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IPPINCOTT'S EDUCATIONAL GUIDES 

EDITED BY WILLIAM F. RUSSELL. A. B. Ph. D. 

DEAN, COLLEGE OF EDUCATION. UNIVERSITY OF IOWA 

ESSENTIAL PRINCIPLES 

OF TEACHING READING 

AND LITERATURE 

N THE INTERMEDIATE GRADES AND 
THE HIGH SCHOOL 



BY 

STERLING ANDRUS LEONARD, A.M. 

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH. THE UNIVERSITY OF 
WISCONSIN AND THE WISCONSIN HIGH SCHOOL 



PHILADELPHIA, LONDON, CHICAGO 
J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY 






,L 



COPYRIGHT, 19*2, BY J. B. LIPP1NCOTT COMPANY 



; 



- : 

PRINTKD BY J. B. LIPPINCOV* COMPANY 

AT THE WASHINGTON SQUARE PKESS 

PHILADELPHIA, U. S. A. 



PREFACE 

This study considers the teaching of reading and of 
literature from the third grade through the high school; 
the separate problems of primary reading are not at- 
tempted. There is here no discussion of " classroom 
methods " except to illustrate how principles of choice or 
of procedure have been carried out in actual schoolrooms. 
It is probable that a compendium of devices and modes of 
operation is oftener misused for literal imitation than 
regarded in the light of basic and fundamental ideas. 

This is no record of specific scientific or experimental 
study; it is simply a statement of essential principles upon 
which it is proposed such research should be planned, and 
a summary of the best available studies heretofore as a 
basis for further work of this sort. No claim is made to 
originality in the material here presented, particularly in 
the attempt to review in elementary fashion the basic 
standards of excellence in literature ( in Chapter I ) . 

The fundamental and central idea of this study is that 
children's reading of literature should be always an 
achievement of realized, true, and significant experience. 
In development of this idea the following matters of pro- 
cedure are presented as essential : — 

I. Securing better literary equipment for the 
teacher of English ; actual conditions and pos- 
sible remedies are canvassed (Chapter II). 
II. Beginning where children actually are in taste 

and comprehension (Chapter III). 
III. Selecting literature for schools according to spe- 
cific criteria (a) of excellence and (b) of adapt- 
ability to children's powers, needs, and interests 



6 PREFACE 

(Chapter IV, illustrated by lists of books in 
Appendix II). 
IV. Separating definitely (a) the teaching of read- 
ing — mastering the technique of comprehension, 
which requires whole-hearted and conscious pur- 
pose for its most effective pursuit — from (b) the 
teaching of literature — securing realization of 
enriching experience, which comes not of con- 
scious purpose, but of unaffected and eager pur- 
suit of fresh and significant aspects of life. 
V. Determining individual children's exact ability 
in understanding what they read, by means of 
objective measurements, and working from that 
point to raise the level of their power in reading 
or study (Chapters V and VI). 
VI. Effecting apprehension of excellent literature, 
through (a) freedom of choice and adherence, 
(b) genuine and cooperative help in realization 
of new experience, and (c) free literary and 
dramatic expression of what the pupil gets from 
his book. (Chapters VII through X). 
The principles of method discussed are based upon three 
fundamental educational doctrines : ( i ) We must begin 
where children actually are; (2) we must secure alto- 
gether significant and valuable materials of study; (3) and 
we must help pupils (a) to realize the immediate worth 
to them of both subject matter and technique and (b) to 
approach great literature in a spirit of unaffected curi- 
osity about fresh aspects of life. 



ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 

My indebtedness for criticism and for ideas is enor- 
mous. The aid of published works, including the funda- 
mental study of the Teaching of English by Carpenter, 
Baker and Scott and the writings of Dr. Dewey and Dr. 
E. L. Thorndike, is perhaps sufficiently noted throughout 
the book and the bibliographies. I am particularly grate- 
ful to Mrs. Dorothy Canfield Fisher and to Messrs. Henry 
Holt and Company, the holders of the copyright, for per- 
mission to include the pages from Understood Betsy, 'and 
and to Dr. Thorndike, Dr. J. F. Hosic, Mr. S. A. 
Courtis, Dr. H. A. Brown, Dr. M. A. Jordan, Mr. Earl 
R. Glenn, of the Lincoln School of Teachers College, 
Columbia University, and Professor Brander Matthews 
for the right to use quotations from highly valuable 
studies. I am indebted to Mr. C. T. Logan and the 
Virginia Teacher for printing a preliminary study to the 
first chapter and to Professor H. G. Paul, of the Univer- 
sity of Illinois, for including Chapter VIII in a recent 
number of the Bulletin of the Illinois Association of 
Teachers of English. 

The contribution of ideas freely given in conferences 
and discussions is more difficult to acknowledge duly, and 
impossible to appreciate sufficiently. I have learned 
much from classes of university graduates and under- 
graduates, " who while I taught them have taught me," 
as well as from my high-school and grade-school pupils. 
To my good friend Mr. Lucius T. Gould, of the 
University of Wisconsin, and to Dr. Ernest Horn, of the 
University of Iowa, I owe ideas too pervasively flowing 

7 



8 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 

through these pages to permit of specific mention; the 
title page of a study like this should read " his and his 
friends'." The courteous and constructive criticism, also, 
of those who have read chapters of the manuscript is most 
inadequately noticed by thanks. Professors H. B. Lathrop, 
of the University of Wisconsin, Rollo S. Lyman, of 
Chicago University, and C. S. Thomas, of Harvard 
University, the School of Education; Mr. C. H. Ward, 
of the Taft School; Principal C. S. Springmeyer, of Pub- 
lic School 85, Brooklyn; my former colleagues Miss Lida 
Lee Tall, now of the Eastern Maryland State Normal 
School, Dr. Harold O. Rugg, and Miss Anne T. Eaton, 
of the Lincoln School of Teachers College — all have 
read thick and forbidding sections of the manuscript. 
Mrs. Emma Sheridan Fry and Miss Ina M. Perego, 
have both criticized helpfully the final chapter. Dr. 
Dudley A. Miles, of Evander Childs High School, and 
Professors Karl Young, of the University of Wisconsin, 
W. S. Hinchman, of Haverford College, and Franklin T. 
Baker, of Teachers College, Columbia University, have 
given their time so generously as to compass the whole 
of the study, and have shown a care and cogency in 
revision and suggestion which have made possible much 
that is best in the final book. 

For help on the lists of books for children's reading 
(Appendix II) I am indebted to the compilers of such 
bibliographies as are noted in the "List of Lists of Chil- 
dren's Reading," and most, of course, to those who have 
permitted me to include the series for special grades and 
subjects, which are credited to their donors. In addition 
to these I have had the benefit of criticism from Miss 
Esse Chamberlain of Oak Park High School ; Miss Alice 
Louise Marsh of Southwestern High School, Detroit; 
Miss Frances Jenkins, Assistant Professor of Education, 



ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 9 

the University of Cincinnati ; and, particularly, Miss Clara 
N. Hawkes of Cicero Township High School, Illinois, 
whose valuable work on the Curriculum Committee of 
the Illinois Association of Teachers of English has done 
much to define the idea of fundamentals in the teaching 
of literature. 

Above all, I owe to my mother, Mrs. Eva Andrus 
Leonard, not only my first induction into great and fine 
literature, but the further help of clear criticisms and 
careful experiments which have enabled me to tie this 
study closer to the needs and problems of the public schools 
in our large cities to-day. 

The University of Wisconsin, 
Madison. 
February 8, 1922. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 



I. The Enrichment of Experience Through Genuine Litera- 
ture 17 

A. Realizable Presentation of Life in Literature. 

B. Truth to Human Experience. 

C. Literature as an Interpretation of Life. 
Summary. 

1 II. The Teacher's Literary Equipment 5 

A. Actual Teachers' Literary Familiarities and Preferences. 

B. What We Ought to Do about It: The Necessity of: 

1. Really knowing how to read. 

2. Variety and depth of first-hand experience. 

3. Much genuine experience of excellent literature. , 

4. Knowledge of major classifications of literature. 

5. Realization of literary periods and essential influences. 

6. Consequent command of valid criteria of excellence. 

7. A sense of the relation of excellent manner, or style, to 

literature. 
Summary. 

,111. Beginning with Children's Actual Experiences and Interests 75 

A. Three Fundamental Educational Principles. 

1. We must begin where children actually are. 

2. We must secure altogether significant and valuable mate- 

rials of study. 

3. We must help pupils to realize the immediate worth 

of our subject, f* 

B. On Knowing Real Children. 

C. Children's Actual Choices of Books. 

D. The Bases of These Interests in Original Nature. 

IV. Types of Excellent Literature Within Children's Interests 101 

A. Genuine Literature for Children. 

1. The growth of children's demands upon literature. 

2. Ideals in literature, and their transference into action. 

3. Classic and modern literature for schools. 

B. Books with Values as Subject-Matter^ 

C. The Problem of School-Library Lists. 

V. An Examination into the Teaching of Reading 138 

A. Finding the Pupils' Level of Ability in Reading. 

1. Testing speed and comprehension in reading. 
- 2. interpreting and using the results of tests. 
-B. Conventional Methods in Teaching Reading. 

11 



./ 



12 CONTENTS 

VI. Principles of Efficient Method in the Teaching of Reading 165 

A. Essential Characteristics of Intelligent Reading. 

B. What the Teaching of Efficient Reading Entails. 

1. Reading, but not curiously. 

2. Selective reading and reference study. 

3. "Chewing and digesting", or reading in detail. 

C. Summary of Essentials in Teaching Comprehension. 

D. What Reading to Teach Where. / 

VII. Class Help in the Understanding of Literature 200 *\ 

Literature as Requiring Real Study. 
The Book Clubs. 

"Turning the Class Back on Itself". 
The Curse of Irrelevant Details and Information. 
What Study is of Most Worth. 
Summary. , 

VIII. Backgrounds and Approaches 241 

Distinguishing between True and False Introductions. 
Reading Aloud with Comment. 
Providing Essential Backgrounds. 
Summary. , 

IX. The Uses of Composition in Teaching Literature '262 

A. Good and Simple Book Notes and Examinations in Literature. 

B. Children's Own Attempts at Literature. 

Summary. I 

X. Educational Dramatization and Dramatic Reading 289 * 

A. Informal Dramatic Reading in the Elementary School. 

B. Prepared Dramatizations of the Pupil's Own Sense of a 

Narrative. 

C. The Values of These Sorts of Dramatization. 

XI. Summary 33s 

Appendix I: Bibliographies on Literature and the 

Teaching of Literature 339 

Appendix II: Reading Lists for Pupils in Elementary and 

High Schools 370 

Some Lists of Children's Books. 

A: Primary Grades. 

B: Intermediate Grades. 

C: Junior High School. 

D: Senior High School. 

Index 439 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

The Creation of Feat iertop Frontispiece 

Fig. i. Some Actual Conditions in Book Selection for 

High-School Libraries 132 

Fig. 2. Some Actual Conditions in Book Selection in One 

School Library 135 

Plate i. Surface of Frequency Showing the Distribution 
in the Case of Rate of Reading in a Fourth Grade 
of 54 Pupils 153 

Plate ii. Surface of Frequency Representing the Distribu- 
tion of Comprehension of the Same Pupils as in 
Plate i 154 

Plate hi. Curve Representing the Growth in Comprehension 

from Third to Eighth Grade Inclusive 155 

The Knave of Hearts, By Louise Saunders facing 192 

Fig. 3. Diagram of a Narrow Stage 303 

Feathertop in His Glory 3 14 

Feathertop Exposed by the Magic Mirror 314 

Program of Feathertop Play 317 

The Extinction of Feathertop 33c 



The readings from the beginning to the end of the 
course, to the end of life itself, need to be as wide and 
varied as earthly life and to give an adequate revelation of 
all major types of human experience, in all portions of the 
world, and with such historical perspective as is needed 
for each of the various regions. And what is more, it 
must look not merely to the tangible and easily apprehended 
things of sense, but also to the intangible forces, influences, 
and relations without a vision of which the more tangible 
things are often meaningless. The intangibles are also 
portions of reality. Any selection will be chosen not upon 
the basis of literary, form or structure ; or nationality of 
the writer ; or language in which he originally wrote ; or 
of the age in which he lived ; or recency of the selection ; 
or fame of the author. It is simply a question of whether 
it presents a clear window through which one can look 
out upon existence. 

Franklin Bobbittv, The Curriculum. 



ESSENTIAL PRINCIPLES OF 

TEACHING READING 

AND LITERATURE 



CHAPTER I 

THE ENRICHMENT OF EXPERIENCE 
THROUGH LITERATURE 

The effect of genuine literature is an enriching or 
enhancement of our experience, both through broadening 
our horizons beyond what we can actually see and touch, 
and through sharpening our perception and understand- 
ing of what is immediately about us. This effect has been 
compared to an opening in blank walls of windows which 
look out upon fair prospects or bleak, and chiefly upon 
human affairs going forward. The outstanding value of 
such experiences is their inevitable influence upon our 
own thought and actions. From such glimpses into fresh 
reality, whenever it is genuine and worth while, we turn 
inevitably to considering, criticizing, and valuing our 
own immediate contact with reality. We thus derive new 
light upon our relations with ourselves and with others, 
upon our constant struggle to make adjustments between 
ourselves and a complex and difficult universe. 

WHAT EXPERIENCE IS 

What do we mean when we speak of experience, 
whether gained " at first hand " or through the reading 
of books? Dr. Dewey has defined it as doing some- 
thing to things and having them do something to us in 
return. " When we experience something we act upon 

2 17 



18 READING AND LITERATURE 

it, we do something with it ; then we undergo or suffer the 
consequences. . . . We learn something." 1 Such is, 
obviously, our experience of cold metal or jagged stones, 
of delicious tastes or choking fumes. But what of ex- 
periences " at second hand," in tale or poem ? What is 
it that we do to the matter in a book? 

A. REALIZABLE PRESENTATION OF LIFE IN LITERATURE 

Our essential and really active contribution in reading 
literature is bringing to it memories of our related past 
experiences. When we see phrases like Rupert Brooke's 
" the blue, bitter smoke of wood," or Masefield's 

A wet road, heaving, shining 
And wild with seagulls' cries 

we may be able to recall specific sense perceptions such as 
the writer suggests. We may, that is, produce at his sug- 
gestion memories of definite past sensations of our own 
(percepts). When we do this, we have actually that inex- 
plainable but quite everyday delight, a realised ex- 
perience through the mere reading of black, printed let- 
ters. But unless we actually make our own contribution 
in this way, the process is not real reading, but only mysti- 
fication or dull mechanical eye-exercise; it is neither real 
nor enjoyable experience. All that an author can possibly 
supply, as Mr. Kerf oot expresses it, is much like a sheet of 
music: a great deal of experience and some technical 
training are required of a reader before he can make any- 
thing of it. 2 We can put into what we read any detail that 

1 John Dewey: Democracy and Education (Macmillan, 1917), 
pp. 163, 171, 272-6, 321-3. 

2 J. B. Kerf oot: How to Read, Chapters I and II, (Boston, 1919). 
And of course men's recall of perceptions varies even more than 
their observation — notably various — of the same events. No two men 
see or report the same details ; of course no two see identical pictures, 
or hear the same sounds, in reading the story of David or 
of Odysseus. 



ENRICHMENT OF EXPERIENCE 19 

we have previously observed with our own five or seven 
senses, and we can put in no other detail. 

NEW EXPERIENCE THROUGH LITERATURE 

Is literature, then, capable only of giving us over again 
experiences we have already had? It does this perhaps 
oftenest, and thus gives us both distinct pleasure in re- 
calling past sense-impressions — even unpleasant ones — 
and a useful deepening and fixing of their effects. But 
literature, as we know, can dp a great deal more than 
merely this. 

Provided specific experiences are present in our mem- 
ories, we can at a writer's suggestion recombine these in 
such fashion that experiences entirely distinctive and new 
result. In reading Henry Esmond we may see, in clear 
pictures, the ruffles and patches and ribbons ; we may hear 
the click of swords, and in some degree feel even the 
keen sword-thrust and the quick gasp of dismay at the 
end of the duelling. How it is possible for us to 
do things so remarkable — even roughly and incorrectly 
as we all do them — how we can see abbeys, and hear sounds 
of Roman war-trumpets, and know quite cordially persons 
that are far beyond our horizons of possibility — this we 
shall take occasion to discuss at another place. But we all 
know that it is possible, because it does happen to us. After 
reading Captains Courageous we are sure we have had 
most of the sensations of being aboard a fishing smack 
off the Grand Banks; if we happen later to meet 
this experience actually, we are aware of a strange famil- 
iarity. And we know Mr. Pickwick and Becky Sharp — 
can picture what they would say or do in this and that 
situation — quite as intimately as we know many 
of our own family, more intimately than most of 
our acquaintances. 



20 READING AND LITERATURE 

We have noted that we can use for this purpose no 
materials save recalled sense-experiences which we have 
already had. In possession of a store of these we can, 
with the juggling, magical reconstruction of imagination, 
dramatize scenes and actions altogether new. What we 
thus produce at the helpful suggestion of poet or drama- 
tist is often so utterly different from our former percep- 
tions as to suggest a chemical compound, like harmless 
necessary salt out of fizzing sodium and ghastly chlorine. 
Yet if we look closely we can never find anything except 
the elements of our past experiences built into the new 
one. It is impossible to put into the dramatization that 
goes on in our reading either properties or costumes, 
personal traits or actions, which we have not already 
perceived and can remember. 3 The challenge to imagine 
anything whatever with other than these elements has 
never been met; ghost or centaur, satyr or giaour is 
but a recombination of familiar elements. The devil of 
the illustrators has a goat foot, a spear-barbed tail, horns, 
and red tights. 

So it is with reconstructing a story like Captains 
Courageous. What the reader has experienced of fish 
and fishing tackle, of boats and bodies of water, of fog and 
storm — all this he must put together in new ways into a 
pageant of the Grand Banks and the Gloucester fleet. 
Thus, instead of treading merely old and worn ways, like 
crones nodding and cackling over threadbare stories, we 
set foot on new paths, and so we cannot but develop new 
ideas and feel differently toward fate and fellowmen. If, 
however, we are unable to put together the perceptional 
elements of the author's story — whether because we lack 
those elements or because we do not take the trouble — 
we can, in an expressive phrase, make nothing of it. We 

3 J. B. Kerfoot: How to Read, Chapter I, pp. ioff. 



4? 

ENRICHMENT OF EXPERIENCE 21 

must do our part; for us that is equally essential with 
the author's constructive labor. 

UNREALIZED STATEMENTS 

For much that we read, of course, we cannot achieve 
such realization or imaginative experiencing. The usual 
school text, for example, with a flat array of statements 
about the Greek gods and their influences and interre- 
lations, gives us little or nothing to realize. All one can do 
with the facts baldly and dully arrayed is to " commit 
them to memory," restate them more or less accurately 
at requirement, and then remember or forget them with 
varying completeness. Of course such information is 
often of real use: it may provide a certain pleasure of 
recognition in new reading; frequently it has practical 
utility. The essential ability to get needed facts from 
text and reference books is discussed in its proper place 
later. 4 But information is too commonly mere words 
learned and parroted, with little understanding of mean- 
ing or value, and no realization as experience. Mrs. 
Wharton's Jane 5 kept all sorts of data from her reading 
" in cold storage in her mind." She never did anything -^ 
to this matter — never organized it into conclusions with */ 
bearing on thought or conduct; she merely poured the 
facts forth, with maddening accuracy, in and out of 
season. Books of knowledge and information have value 
and even give pleasure ; but they are obviously no part of 
literature. \ Only vividly realized, concrete experience, and 
the best ways of securing it through books and making it 
fruitful in life, are of real concern in the teaching 
of literature. / 

* Chapter VI, p. 168. 

B Edith Wharton- "The Mission of Jane," in The Descent 
of Man. 



22 READING AND LITERATURE 

Contrast with the compendium of mythological facts 
the legend of Demeter and Proserpina as retold in The 
Age of Fable, of that of Cupid and Psyche in Apuleius' 
Golden Book 6 or in William Morris' Earthly Paradise. 
There you can see some of the mere facts of mythic lore 
incarnated, and moving in beautiful story. So with the 
tedious facts of hero-tale and epic. No one ever found 
the chronologies of these stories in handbooks either en- 
riching or vital; but no one, surely, has read with senses 
alert the story of Odysseus swimming to land, or of the 
Trojan King in Achilles' tent, without vivid and 
moving realization. 

The following sentences illustrate admirably the mean- 
ingless conventional description which abounds in third- 
rate books; it is wholly without concrete, realizable detail. ( 
This is a fair sample of Mr. H. B. Wright : 7 
. . . There was something about the girl on the quick- 
stepping, spirited horse that challenged attention. The 
khaki-clad figure was so richly alive — there -was such a 
wealth of vitality; such an abundance of young woman's 
strength; such a glow of red blood expressed in every 
curved line and revealed in every graceful movement — that 
the attraction was irresistible. To look at Barbara Worth 
was pleasure ; to be near her was delight. 

" THE CULTIVATION OF THE EMOTIONS " 

The whole question of the value and importance of a 
piece of literature depends simply on what happens inside 
one, when he reads it, or afterwards ; it is solely a matter 
of its effect upon him. Now, the effect of much verse 
and of many novels and plays is mere arousal of one's 
emotions about nothing in particular, simply because they 

8 Translated in Pater's Marius the Epicurean. 
T The Winning of Barbara Worth, p. 63 (Book Supply Company 
Chicago, 1911.) 



ENRICHMENT OF EXPERIENCE 23 

have often been aroused by the same stimulus before — as 
when the popular novelist or " sob-story" reporter plays 
on feelings by using commonplace conventional themes 
like a lover's heartbreak, a foreclosed mortgage, 8 a mother- 
in-law's death, or " ruthless and despotic oppression." 
These stock phrases have no real meaning, based in their 
own experience, to nine persons in ten. Yet they can 
always be counted upon to stir the great public to vague 
splurges of feeling, or laughter, or loose sobs. Common, 
race-old feelings, rooted in instinct, are always ready to 
be touched off on little or no occasion; having been so 
stirred, they are ever readier to respond to merely a phrase 
or an echo. So the emotions are loosened and their con- 
trols become weakened. 

Of course such mere emotional arousal, in the fashion 
of revival meetings or cheap political speeches, is in a 
sense experience ; in a loose sense everything is experience. 
And this cheap emotion is all that many readers of popu- 
lar stories are capable of getting from their literature, of 
incredible adventures and worn old love-situations. But 
this sort of thing is not experience in our sense, of "doing 
something to things and undergoing the consequences." 
It is merely taking emotional stimuli direct, as though the 
heart or the tear-glands were stirred by electric shocks or 
by drugs. Literature of this type is popular with sixteen- 
year-olds of all ages, because it conducts them by what 
may be called the "emotional short-circuit." Instead of 
insuring that readers " sense " anything genuine, instead 
of giving them a basis of new and richer experience, it 
drains-off feeling over old and worn paths and floods out 
the intelligence. Such literature — and the like music and 
painting — extends the domination over men's minds of 
what Professor W. S. Hinchman calls " small logic and 

8 Mr. Stephen Leacock plays cleverly on certain of these themes 
in his Nonsense Novels. 



24 READING AND LITERATURE 

unnecessary tears." It has produced the apt condemna- 
tion of much fiction and oratory and drama as a sort of 
" intellectual saloon." 

What, then, of the usually accepted definition of the 
purpose of literature as a " cultivation of the emotions?" 
What of the emotional element which is recognized as an 
essential ingredient of genuine literature? These are 
fundamental questions, and we shall need to consider 
them carefully. 

THE BASIS OF TRUE EMOTION 

The simplest one-celled animal, when it comes upon a 
particle of food, doubtless feels agreeable emotion as it 
absorbs this; as it recoils from an unpleasantly sharp 
fragment it no doubt feels pain. These feelings are use- 
ful guides that form its experience and make possible its 
survival and propagation. Throughout the domain of 
living creatures there is likewise no real sense-perception, 
no "sensing" of anything, without some feeling about it 
— liking, aversion, disgust, fear, or keen interest. 9 On 
the other hand, no arousal of emotion that is not caused by 
sensory experience or a recollection of such experience 
(precepts) is of any significant value as experience. 

As we have noted, deliberate attempts to stir up 
excitement or sobs or terror or passion are constantly 
made by hectic and hysterical appeal. They are successful 
because these instinctive feelings are easily set loose, as 
animals are stampeded at a cry of alarm. It is the fault of 
third-rate musicians to force a lugubrious nuance and note, 
and of resourceless poets to dissolve in tears on no per- 
ceivable provocation. The easy arousal of excitement is 
illustrated in any story of quite incredible perils, or 

8 Of course a neutral state of boredom or lack of feeling means 
merely a faint stimulus, or such worn channels of sensation that no 
reaction occurs. 



ENRICHMENT OF EXPERIENCE 25 

in the absurd but pernicious situations of passion which 
Robert Chambers invents liberally. It is easily detected in 
the lowest depths of fiction and verse, in bad and lurid 
magazines, and in uncounted children's books. No intel- 
ligent person, for example, can read critically the second 
chapter of Wright's Re-creation of Brian Kent without 
discovering the ludicrousness of its amazing bombast. 

We do not, however, often observe how widely 
prevalent is this trick in much work which has some right 
to rank as literature. Examine, for instance, this account 
of a slave market : 

. . . There, in the bright November sunlight, a sight 
met his eyes which turned him sick and dizzy. 

Against the walls and pillars of the building already 
grimy with soot, crouched a score of miserable human 
beings waiting to be sold at auction. Mr. Lynch's 
slave pen had been disgorged that morning. Old and 
young, husband and wife — the moment was come for all 
and each. How hard the stones ! And what more pitiless 
than the gaze of their fellow creatures in the crowd 
below ! Oh friends, • we who live in peace and plenty 
amongst oufown families, how little do we realize the 
terror and misery and the dumb heartaches of those 
days. Stephen thought with agony of seeing his own 
mother sold before him in that way. And the building in 
front of him was lifted from its foundations and rocked 
even as shall the temples on the judgment day. 

The oily auctioneer was inviting the people to pinch 
the wares. Men came forward and looked into their 
mouths, and one brute, unshaven and with filthy linen, 
snatched a child from its mother's lap. Stephen shud- 
dered with the sharpest pain he had ever known. . . . 

Hark! was that the sing-song voice of the auctioneer? 
He was selling the cattle. High and low, caressing and 
menacing, he teased and exhorted them to buy. They 
were bidding for the possession of souls, bidding in the 



26 READING AND LITERATURE 

currency of the Great Republic. And between the eager 
shouts came a moan of sheer despair. What was the at- 
tendant doing now? He was tearing two of them from 
a last embrace. 10 

Do you remember the Ohio Congressman in Uncle 
Tom's Cabin, who returned home from Washington to 
find Eliza and her baby in his house? He had been so 
little moved by fervid abolition oratory as to vote for the 
Fugitive Slave Bill; but he immediately aided the escape 
of these fugitive slaves. It is concrete experience like his — 
actually seeing and sensing — that moves men powerfully. 
Of such experience Mr. Churchill gives us little; more 
could have been done, with such details as would make us 
inescapably to see these "miserable human beings" — per- 
haps a helpless gesture of agony like that in Rodin's Age 
of Bronze, or the strains of the auction song, "Nobody 
Knows de Trouble I've Seen/' or dumb looks backward. 
Instead of trusting to such specific details as he has given, 
and to any American reader's memories of similar expe- 
riences secured in Uncle Tom's Cabin and similar books, 
Mr. Churchill must attempt to stir us up by excited apos- 
trophe — "Oh friends!" and the like — and by a dizzying 
and apocryphal vision of judgment. In a word, he is 
so eager to get at our emotions and rend them, to force 
us into feeling his horror and hatred, that he abandons the 
one altogether certain road to that end. 11 

An effective contrast with this is presented in a story 
of De Maupassant's. When the French woman, Mother 
Sauvage, 12 after getting cruelly detailed word of her son's 

10 Winston Churchill : The Crisis. By special arrangement with 
and permission of the Macmillan Company. 

11 1 am not, obviously assuming that Mr. Churchill is fairly repres- 
ented by the passage quoted, but simply illustrating that this method 
of trying to turn on emotion as if from a tap or to squeeze it out 
with the bare hands, common though it be, is neither so sure nor so 
permanent in effect as the presentation of concrete sense-experience. 

"De Maupassant: The Odd Number (Harper, 1889). 



ENRICHMENT OF EXPERIENCE 27 

death in battle, skins a rabbit which the German sol- 
diers have brought in, and the blood runs over her 
hands, we need no indication of either her emotions or 
her imaginings. 

Writers who work the " emotional short-circuit " may 
indeed " make 'em weep" freely; but they never really 
achieve that realization of genuine human emotion which 
is alone a permanent, significant influence in the reader's 
experience. Exaggerated appeal to the emotions may 
exist along with vivid and concrete presentation, as some- 
times in Bjornson and Dickens. But those who freely 
1 'fiddle harmonics on the sensual string" are a source of 
real peril. 13 

PRESENTATION OF INTERPRETATIONS OR CONCLUSIONS 

When a writer wants to impart conclusions or in- 
terpretations — his dearest beliefs in morals or politics or 
social theory — his most clear and direct course would 
seem to be a logical and perspicuous statement of his idea. 
But such a statement alone will not get others either to see 
or to accept his point ; to assume this is unwarranted as to 
suppose that any one is enabled to realise facts boldly stated 
in texts and tabulations. Men adopt and act upon 
opinions for various reasons, many of them stupid preju- 
dices and taboos. But what gives a show of permanent 
authority to any belief is oftenest some concrete and per- 
sonal experience apparently supporting it. One instance 
is enough to confirm most men in a not too impossible 
or unpalatable belief. Two or three examples are, for 
untrained minds, absolute and incontrovertible proof. A 
student of mine cited two incursions of black cats into 
her sister's home, each followed by a child's death, as 
complete evidence of direct causation. Obviously super- 

" See A. H. R. Fairchild : The Teaching of Poetry (Boston, 1914), 
p. 69. 



28 READING AND LITERATURE 

stition of this sort is much worse than absurd; we need 
full analysis of scientific proof, in all our schools, to coun- 
teract loose thinking. Such, nevertheless, is the fact of 
human reasoning as it works now ; it accepts direct, per- 
sonal sense-experience, and next to that the report of some- 
one else's concrete experience, as the safest hold on reality. 

Literature which presents conclusions or interpreta- 
tions effectively, we can easily discover, makes full use 
of this fact. It usually backs its statements by concrete 
details seeming to confirm them. In Antony's speech 
the use of dead Caesar's wounds and of the terms of the 
will — "to every several man, seventy-five drachmas" — 
fully covers all bareness of logical proof, and fur- 
nishes convincing illustration of the effectiveness of 
sensory experience. 

Often, indeed, a speaker can safely assume in his audi- 
ence a common body of definitely conceived, sensory ex- 
perience. The fear of ambition, pride, and a crown were 
so fixed in Roman tradition as to be only a little less potent 
than Caesar's blood and his reported gift of drachmas. 
So, the audience at the Gettysburg dedication had close in 
the background of their minds dramatic scenes of 
bravery at Valley Forge and Yorktown, of daring men 
issuing the Declaration of Independence and subduing 
narrower loyalties to the necessity of a constitution. 
Without these very concrete and vivid traditions, the 
words " our fathers brought forth on this continent a new 
nation, conceived in liberty," though beautiful in sound, 
would have meant little or nothing. But these, readily 
imagined, in the presence of the agony of the Civil War, 
brought with them their inevitable emotion, and made 
Lincoln's hearers susceptible to the new interpretation 
which he put upon that day. 

So for the ideas and conclusions developed in books of 



ENRICHMENT OF EXPERIENCE 29 

science, and history, and economics : It is essential that 
definite experience is or actually has been lived through by 
the reader, or vividly imagined by him, so that in his 
reading it is before him in dramatic form. 14 

Even the ideals which most deeply influence us, 
whether consciously or but vaguely realized, are proba- 
bly without exception traceable to very real experiences 
that we have undergone, in actual life, or in plays or 
books or lively family tradition; and it is these funda- 
mental experiences which give our ideals their power- 
ful validity. Only by a like process can interpretations 
of duty or polity or economics be more than mere 
words, without solidity of meaning or permanence of 
influence on feeling and hence on conduct. They will 
stand else with bare unrealized statements of fact in 
books of information; you can do nothing to them 
but memorize them; and, having done nothing sig- 
nificant with them, you discover that they will do nothing 
for or to you. 

The value and contribution of genuine literature, then, 
is in its power of suggesting to us such sense-percepts as 
we, in memory and with the reconstructing aid of imag- 
ination, can see and taste and handle. Out of such con- 
crete matter of experience — never, in real literature, with- 
out this — we are helped to new emotional reactions, and 
also to new understanding of relations, to new conclusions 
about the incidents of our own lives. Only where new 
or revivified old experience is realized truly can emotions 
be honestly and vitally stirred; only so can genuinely 
realized conclusions, of true effect and permanent value, 
be reached. This is the process and the potential value of 
true literature. 

14 If he is more highly trained to think, the experience may be 
submerged, as it were, just underneath the words, but not con- 
sciously called up or referred to. 



3 o READING AND LITERATURE 

In sum : Sensory experience, whether direct or recalled 
(percepts) — and this alone with completest power and 
validity — always arouses feeling or emotion ; and it inevi- 
tably leads to interpretations or conclusions. 

B. TRUTH TO HUMAN EXPERIENCE 

j 

Since great literature has this power of enhancing and 
enlarging our imaginative experience, it is clearly of great 
importance that what it presents be true to human ex- 
perience. Now, this is without question a more difficult 
test to apply than that of realizableness. None of us, 
each in his small and circumscribed corner of life, know 
much about what such truth is, however insistently we 
may try to persuade ourselves and others that we do. 
Nevertheless, each of us is compelled to judge it as best he 
can for himself. Our success in doing this is our sole 
defence against capture by each absurd vendor of emo- 
tional fiction or of social and religious panaceas ; it is the 
measure of our growth from the self-important fulness 
of knowledge which possesses Amy Grey 15 to the cautious 
and temperate examination and critical suspension of 
judgment in a reader of, for instance, Mr. Galsworthy's 
studies of social maladjustment. It is obviously of the 
highest importance that every one enlarge his range and 
depth of experience to the widest possible extent. And to 
do this we must come open-mindedly to whoever appears 
able to give essential and honest assistance in attacking 
appearances with the senses and applying the mind to 
what is underneath them. 

" THE REAL IS NOT ALWAYS THE ACTUAL " 

First of all, it is to be noted that true literature has for 
its province human experience in and for itself; it is no- 
wise concerned with the imparting of any sort of 

"In Barrie's Alice Sit-by-the-Fire. 



ENRICHMENT OF EXPERIENCE 31 

; : 

I knowledge; it cares little or nothing for scientific or 
: historical fact as fact. 16 The " literature of knowledge," 
! as we shall observe later, must apply tests not alone of 
concrete and realizable experience, but of exact fidelity in 
' science and other domains of thought. Literature proper, 
i the " literature of power " — the interpretation of life in 
; poetry and fiction and drama — seeks truth only to human 
! nature and to the consequences of human thought and 
j action. What does not affect this is, for its purpose, imma- 
; terial. " The real is not always the actual," as Stevenson 
j puts it ; and our demand in literature is not for facts, but 
I for the reality of human experience. Thus, Scott suc- 
ceeds in giving us vivid and satis fyingly real pictures of 
King Richard's crusading, in spite of misstatements of 
fact which dismay certain historians. And for most of us 
the truly living pageant of English history is unrolled by 
Shakespeare and Macaulay, rather than in the pages of 
exact and careful scholars. While inaccuracy in facts 
is, of course, no contribution to our realization, as readers 
of literature we care not for accuracy, but solely for help 
in realizing life. 17 

TRUTH TO CAUSE AND EFFECT IN HUMAN EXPERIENCE 

There is, however, an important realm wherein we 
demand of all literature which purports to depict life truly, 
the most sincere and enlightened truth : We require, and 
rightly, an honest and significantly true picturing of the 
effects of human thought and action. This must be true 
in the largest sense, of giving a right idea of relations be- 
tween people in actual life, and between thoughts and acts 
and their consequences according to natural law and 
the social order. 



16 G. E. Woodberry : The Appreciation of Literature, pp. 194 ff. 
"John Dewey: Reconstruction in Philosophy (Holt, 1920), pp. 1-5. 



32 READING AND LITERATURE 

Clearly, this is the most difficult, indeed the most im- 
possible demand that can be made of literature. For no 
writing can give us a true view, wholly complete or in 
right perspective, of the smallest human action — as of 
Maggie Tulliver's river-trip with Stephen. Its real causes 
extend far back in the thought and mood and action and 
even in the unconscious mind and the remote heredity of 
the doer. Its effects may reverberate through many years, 
and appear in unguessed places, perhaps after the original 
cause has been altogether forgotten. All that the keenest 
analyst can do is to dissect out some of the ramifications 
of cause and effect. 18 The careless or unskilled writer, 
on the contrary, reaches for unselected handfuls of life, 
without earnest search for truth or proportion, and pre- 
sents these as his contribution to our experience. Clearly, 
his books cannot give us added perception of true human 
experience. Oftentimes they leave the impression that 
evil and anti-social practices — -keen and greedy exploita- 
tion, for example — have other consequences than these 
actually produce in the long run and in affecting large 
numbers of people. We see but foreshortened details in 
the picture, and no genuine perspective. A popular exhibi- 
tion of a shrewd thief, 19 obviously directly descended from 
Reynard the Fox, shows only the flare of a rocket burning 
among the sleazy stuffs of human credulity; the stories 
do not show the destruction and misery spread by its 
flames. They are only made the more objectionable by 
a silly bit of repentance and promised reform, intruded 
at the end to satisfy moralist requirements ; the story of 
Reynard the Fox is not so distorted! Novels, too, like 
those of Robert W. Chambers, that portray strong, heroic 
men and ideally lovely women as without the slightest 
emotional or moral control, but that give no glimpse 

18 See, on this point, Stevenson's A Humble Remonstrance. 

19 George Randolph Chester ; Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford. 



ENRICHMENT OF EXPERIENCE 33 

of the resulting atrophy of self, and of the social 
calamity that springs from such roots, are of course still 
more pernicious. 

TRUTH AND THE HAPPY ENDING 

Upon making this demand for true representation of 
human experience we meet squarely the common insistence 
upon " happy endings " in stories. Nothing could be more 
natural and human than this desire ; we all, of course, want 
happy endings for our own lives — a satisfactory resolution 
of our incessant struggles to make adjustments between 
ourselves and the facts of nature and of other men. 20 As 
we all feel a little uneasy about the issue in our individual 
struggles, we are the more eager to be fortified by behold- 
ing satisfactory resolutions in books and on the stage. 

LITERATURE OF FANTASY AND FANCY 

There is no harm whatever in this desire so long as it 
does not get us away from a firm grasp on reality. It 
leads us first of all to a zestful reading of impossible 
romances and fairy stories, where the limitations of actual 
everyday life do not hold, but magic and luck, incredible 
achievement and beauty too bright to be credited, 
weave a most satisfying fabric to shut out reality for a 
time. We do not ask for truth to human experience in 
the Arabian Nights; we are not shocked, in the ballad, at 
Childe Roland's fearful readiness to cut off his own sister's 
head ; we rejoice at the success of the lying peasant woman 
and her daughter in tricking the king and Tom-Tit-Tot 
and establishing a hold on royalty. 

Of course, as we grow beyond childhood we realize 
that these folk-stories, whatever may have been their 
barbaric "moral" exaltation of skilful trickery and im- 

20 "The Happy Ending:" Nation, July 17, 1920 (111:63). 
3 



34 READING AND LITERATURE 

plicit obedience, are to-day merely romance and fable. We 
enjoy them as we do The Jumblies or Jabberwocky; they 
are a relaxation from the unending necessity of recog- 
nizing the often harsh truths both of everyday living and of 
realistic literature. But we do not forget our umbrellas 
and overshoes when we go out into the storm after the 
spectacle. We do not demand truth in Shakespeare's 
romantic comedies; for, in spite of great likeness to life in 
some of their characters, we are nowise tempted to con- 
found their action with everyday reality, but enjoy them 
merely for their inconsequence, or in spite of it. 

It is not among the uncredited happenings of romance 
or folk literature or nonsense that we are in greatest 
danger of losing our sense of actual human experience; 
it is rather in more apparently credible fabrications which 
in every age gain immense currency and credit. Their 
appeal is always brief; in a generation the names of even 
the most popular are quite forgotten. Nevertheless their 
great temporary influence is perilous, because they purport 
to present truth when they do not. 

The demand for the happy ending calls oftenest on two 
auxiliaries which popular belief always credits : the reso- 
lution of difficulties or attainment of ends by luck, and 
the rewarding of good and punishment of evil by an 
assumed potency of universal right or " poetic justice." 
The belief that these two forces war always on one's own 
side, which is readily confounded with the side of abstract 
and perfect right, lies at the root of most untruth in litera- 
ture. That its effects are bad, needs merely brief indication. 

THE LITERATURE OF TRUST IN LUCK 

That chance or luck potently affects human fate and 
changes the results of human choice and action is patent. 
The writer of cheap fiction therefore feels free to trust it 
for effecting any desired conclusion. The hall-mark of the 



ENRICHMENT OF EXPERIENCE 35 

half -educated man, it has been suggested, is just the in- 
clination to " trust to luck " for bringing things out right 
for him or his cause. 21 He speculates blithely on the most 
woefully incompetent data, in such serious concerns as 
love, finance, health, and politics. When he fails he 
whines or curses luck; when successful he takes heart to 
speculate more outrageously. His favorite literature con- 
firms the domination of this bad habit by representing men 
as whirled to power or riches or rapturous delight by un- 
foreseen chance — an encounter by hazard, a legacy, or any 
accident. The story that purports to represent genuine 
human experience, but has for the mainspring of its action 
a successful issue of this unintelligent trust in chance, is 
likely to have a loose, dulling effect ; as a steady diet such 
fictions are unquestionably hurtful. On the other hand, the 
effects of chance may be used, even to the point of straining 
our credulity, without this danger. Chance vitally influ- 
ences the course of the story at several points in Silas 
Marner — but not trust in luck; indeed, this very trust is 
clearly shown as wellnigh fatal to the happiness of both 
Godfrey Cass and Silas himself. As was suggested in our 
examination into the reasons for popular beliefs, 22 we are 
direly in need of training to take in all aspects of a situa- 
tion and make allowances for chance, in scientific and not 
stupid fashion. The popular story to-day is often of per- 
sons who do quite absurd things on vagrant impulse, and 
so light fortunately on the golden opportunity or the in- 
comparable maiden to complete their vague but cherished 
dreams. 23 This sort of thing is even commoner in stories 
for children. In either place it is harmful so far as, in the 

21 E. L. Thorndike: "The Psychology of the Half-Educated 
Man," Harper's Magazine, April, 1920. 

22 Above, p. 2J, 

M As a wholly chance example in current magazine fiction, Alice 
Duer Miller's Beauty and the Bolshevist. 



36 READING AND LITERATURE 

large mass, it misleads by false representation of the facts 
of chance in human affairs. 

The educated man, as Dr. Thorndike well points 
out, knows indeed that chance may change the entire 
aspect of his life ; but he also knows that it is just as likely 
to be against him as for him ; therefore he figures that it 
will be unfavorable and makes ready for it. He is not 
misled by a chance advantage, for he knows the plain 
mathematics of what the duller observer calls his luck. 
The use of unfavorable accident in the classic tragedies 
has seemed to puzzle many. It is perhaps no inconsider- 
able part of their service, and of the service of later 
tragedians like Hardy and Ibsen, that they show ill fortune 
attending the deliberate or the inevitable taking of chances. 
Hamlet's stab through the arras and Tess's assumption 
that her letter had been read, fully as we exculpate the 
doer from intentional wrong, nevertheless give the final 
impetus to their destruction. The attending ill fortune 
is not, as in the best-selling novel or dramatic success, 
merely a device for emphasizing glorious fortune to come 
— that cheap and shabby trick of untruth; it hounds the 
doer to the end. The presenter of truth in literature 
does not stoop to present ignorance as purity and strength, 
or ill-informed daring as an impenetrable buckler. 

THE DISTORTION OF MORALIZING 

Stories with a set theory of morality, or with any other 
set theory, often distort truth even more badly than those 
that rely on lucky chance. The writer without pene- 
trating insight would lead us to believe that his economic 
or social insight, his optimistic or morbid view of human 
affairs, is unerring in the tracing of cause and effect. When 
we suspect that a writer thus chooses or interprets human 
actions with the purpose of proving a theory in economics 



ENRICHMENT OF EXPERIENCE 37 

or in ethics, We may perhaps admire his work as a clever 
tract; we shall do well not to accept it as truthful or 
permanently valuable literature. For such books are the 
work of a sort of sentimentalists. Sentimentalism, quite 
distinct from wholesome and honest sentiment, is simply 
an inability or a refusal to see things as they are in their 
actual relationships : to perceive, for instance, such neces- 
sary following from cause to effect as we discover in tragic 
stories like that of Tess or of Maggie Tulliver. Many an 
enthusiast in every week's outpouring of magazines and 
books labors to convert us by concrete presentation in story 
or drama of what purports to be genuine experience. He 
selects cases which appear to prove that eugenics or 
universal military training or optimistic short-sightedness 
is a panacea for human ills — in Mrs. Burnett's The Dawn 
of Tomorrow, for example. To such thesis-mongering we 
have a right to offer exception and objection. Clear seeing 
is difficult enough with even the best training and with 
earnest effort to be rid of prejudging. Special pleaders 
with blue or with rose-colored spectacles are unlikely to 
read us a record of fair and impartial observation of 
causation and effect in human affairs. 

THE DEMAND FOR ABSTRACT " JUSTICE " 

The demand for justice as the writer has preconceived 
it or been taught to expect it is an illustration excellently in 
point here. It is as old, at least, as the peculiar comfort 
proposed by Job's friends; and Job's perception of a dif- 
ferent reality has always enjoyed less general acceptance. 
The thirst for happiness, in men of the true senti- 
mentalist fashion who refuse to encounter facts, leads 
them to demand that evil persons be " come up with " at 
once. They require that virtue be rewarded in practical 
bodily ease and financial prosperity, and that excellent 



38 READING AND LITERATURE 

intentions, no matter how feeble, produce huge and im- 
mediate good fruitage. 24 

One of the most persistent and recurring human 
motives is missionary zest. Apparently no more fine 
and beautiful manifestation of altruism can be conceived 
than the determination to share one's lovely and satisfying 
truth of outlook and motive with those who sit in dark- 
ness. But it is possible that as much harm is done by this 
as by any evil motive. I am told there is a French 
proverb to the effect that " goodness is more dangerous 
than evil, because evil has at least the restraint of con- 
science/' The moral reformer feels no need of inhibitions. 
He knows the truth — as he thinks — and publishes and 
enforces it without limit. He is the sort of Puritan who ex- 
tinguishes the color and harmony of life, who closes the 
play houses. 25 She is the woman who sacrifices herself 
to marry a profligate and reform him, and thus turns 
morality into a curtain lecture and her own life to irre- 
mediable misery. Second-rate literature, with the sanction 
of the missionary moralists in schools, frequently pre- 
sents as right ideals what are but scarred fragments of 
truth, and gives no compensating views of their insuffi- 
ciency. There is peril in the ideas that material happiness 
is an inevitable reward of morality, and that there is 
magical protection in a purity of thought that is actually 
mere ignorance. Such literature as presents these as true 
is distinctly pernicious. 

Most men shrink at first from the implacable meting 
of suffering in Mr. Hardy's novels, in Lear and Othello, 
or in Oedipus the King, because these present the re- 
verberating, terrible consequences of ignorance and mis- 
take — and not of deliberate wrong-doing alone — of natural 

S4 On the question of true ideals presented in literature, see 
Chapter III. 

" Dunsany's Fifty-one Tales: "The Puritan." 



ENRICHMENT OF EXPERIENCE 39 

or social laws unknowingly violated, of consequences un- 
foreseen as well as consequences defied. We need to note 
this specifically: What we may consider moral guilt or 
innocence does not necessarily enter, in real life or in its 
true presentation in literature, to determine the issue. The 
most sincere and honest attempt to do right — to effect 
reform in other people's lives or our own, or to meet evil 
with good — is in fact implacably punished, as in The Mill 
on the Floss or in Mrs. Wharton's Ethan Frome, if it 
goes counter to natural law and social convention. In so 
far as these stories convince us that out of the actions 
presented these results were probable and natural, if not 
inevitable, issues, these tragedies are a great presentation 
of a necessary part of truth. And this test we need to 
apply to all picturings of consequences, from the Agamem- 
non and the Antigone to The Scarlet Letter, Meredith's 
Richard Fever el, or Mr. Galsworthy's Justice. Given the 
stern Puritan ideal of morality and law, and the fate of 
Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale was inescapable; 
given the stern pride of father and son and Sir Austin's 
loving but stupidly wrong attempt to "play Providence/' 
and the fate of Richard and Lucy Feverel is, if not inevit- 
able, at least a true — a credible and possible — development. 
We need to view with open eyes such pictures of 
human action and its results — the fate which punishes 
both mistakes and blind attempts at right as implacably 
as it pursues villainy, the social mis judgment that deals 
more harshly with Maggie Tulliver's eager attempt to be 
just than it does with deliberate injustice. Only this ex- 
perience can work in us the " purifying effect of tragedy " 
of which Aristotle wrote. For with special definiteness 
and sureness it cleanses from our minds the effects of sickly 
sentimentalities, of blindly optimistic moralizing, and of 
pernicious representations of strong lives as ruled alto- 



4 o READING AND LITERATURE 

gether by blind animal emotion, with no control by will or 
social ideas or implacable law. 

In all great tragedy we find the inevitable consequences 
of violated natural or social law, often with little regard 
for intention or for conventional moral ideas. In addi- 
tion to this representation of the truth we find sometimes 
the power of the human spirit — of Job, or Antigone, or 
Joan of Arc, or Christ — rising sublime above the most 
terrible misadventure. If we are thus led to find the 
springs of strength and conquest, and even of a genuine 
happiness, in a power superior to utmost woe and horror, 
we may be wakened to the deepest understanding of life 
and its significance. 

It is quite possible that, in reaction from the prevailing 
sentimentality of life and literature, the great writers have 
in recent years placed too much stress on a sterner view of 
life. Certainly there is truth and pleasant wholesome- 
ness in many pictures of normal human beings, like 
Evan Harrington, or Edward Clayhanger and Hilda 
Lessways, who fit and alter both themselves and a not too 
adverse environment, and thus evolve measurably happy 
endings for their lives without notable injustice. But 
the dimensions of human suffering — of poverty and 
disease and other misadjustments — are constantly forced 
on our notice to-day, no more by literature than by scien- 
tific study. We are learning slowly but unforgettably the 
harm of shutting our eyes in prudishness or comfort; we 
are discovering that we cannot be altogether healthy in 
a world that conceals wretchedness in back courts or filthy 
rooms. Literature, like Mr. Galsworthy's man with the 
lantern, 26 rightly persists in casting light on such matters, 
and picturing and interpreting their causes and their con- 
sequences. The story of false cheer, and even the tale 



20 



John Galsworthy: "A Novelist's Allegory" in The Inn of 
Tranquillity. 



ENRICHMENT OF EXPERIENCE 41 

of fantasy and romance, is a constantly less secure and 
permanent refuge for distressed persons who would evade 
knowledge and responsibility. 

Men and women with sane minds and reasonably wide 
experience on which to base judgments can well afford 
to listen to whoever appears to give a measurably true 
picture of any phase of life — to Dreiser or Zola or Gorki 
as well as to writers of less awful view. Dr. Matthews 
well says : " The author may have a wider knowledge and 
a deeper vision ; and he may go searchingly below the sur- 
face, disclosing things ugly and abhorrent. This may 
shock us, but what shocks us is not necessarily immoral. 
Very often, indeed, it is profoundly moral, with the par- 
ticular morality which we happen most to need. Morality is 
not in the choice of subject-matter, else would ' Oedipus ' 
and 'Othello,' the 'Scarlet Letter' and 'Anna 
Karenina' be immoral. It is in treatment, in the stern 
firmness which braces the soul for combat with evil, or in 
the looseness of tone which tends to relax the fiber. It 
is not in the avoidance of dangerous topics that morality 
lies, but in the temper with which they are treated." 27 

Wherever you discover what seems to you clear evi- 
dence of limitations in viewing human action and human 
relationships — limitations of dyspeptic morbidity, or of 
stupid optimism, or of social and moral beliefs that make 
impossible a clear view of opposing facts — you will do 
well to seek other and more broadly true literature as a 
corrective of your visual angle. But every one must at 
the same time remember that his own experience, in both 
literature and life, is small and limited; no one can be safe 
in arbitrary judgment based on his observation only, but is 
in duty bound to get the most possible assistance from 

"Brander Matthews: A Study of the Drama (Boston, 1910), 
p. 231. 



42 READING AND LITERATURE 

great and unprejudiced minds upon what strikes him as 
either true or false. 



C. LITERATURE AS AN INTERPRETATION OF LIFE 

Provided we insist upon what is realizable — sense-ible 
— and true to human experience, we are so far safe in 
our selection of genuine literature. But we have discov- 
ered no test which distinguishes literature proper — the 
" literature of power " of De Quincey's fundamental 
classification — on the one hand from direct experience 
itself, and, on the other, from any realizable and true 
account in either science or history. We shall do well to 
demand also that what we consider genuine literature of 
the interpretation of life — we may again set aside fantasy 
and incredible romance as a legitimate but special pleas- 
ure-domain — must be also significant and worth our zvhile. 
It is clearly not significant if it claim our attention for 
what, no matter how true it may be as isolated incident, is 
trivial and immaterial to our experience, or is even bestial 
or pernicious; we demand measurable restraint as a cri- 
terion of genuine Avorth. Nor is it significant if it be 
merely platitudinous in restating without a difference what 
we have all along observed and credited; it must have 
something of the keen perception and interpreting which 
we are used to call creative insight. We may then state 
as a final and distinguishing criterion of the " literature 
of power " that it helps us toward the unattainable ideal 
in Matthew Arnold's hyperbole, of seeing life steadily and 
whole. 28 As we shall note, it always turns our regard back 
upon ourselves and our experience, and thus results in 
revaluing, weighing, and in the truest sense appreciating 
our everyday lives and their true meaning. 

33 In his early sonnet "To a Friend." 



ENRICHMENT OF EXPERIENCE 43 

RESTRAINT AND PERSPECTIVE 

In discussing the place of emotions and sentiment in 
literature we have already discovered that the mere con- 
ventional stirxing; o_f teeJing Js ...unworthy and hurtful ; that 
emotion of worth must grow out of genuine experience. 
But there is necessary more than this if we would discover 
a criterion of the highest excellence in literature. For a 
first condition of great and permanent effectiveness, as op- 
posed to immediate and passing success, is emotional re- 
straint. We rightly object to the poignant and terrible 
presentation in literature of suffering which is inevitable 
and socially necessary, like that of travail. So long as war 
was regarded as inescapable, the same objection was held 
against presenting its agony and horror. But the current 
shift in beliefs about international relations and the en- 
forcement of peace has been accompanied and hastened 
by such an outpouring of the truth about war as has 
never before been remotely approached. 

On the contrary, demands for unnecessary tears in 
scenes like the death of little Nell and of Paul Dombey, or 
in much of Bjornson's Arne, if yielded to, result in a kind 
of intoxication. The typical moving picture in which a 
maiden is shown gaspingly perishing for love is far worse 
than silly. It is an ineradicable pernicious influence ; it 
becomes in unformed minds an ideal of romance that may 
translate itself into any folly. Instinctive emotions — 
pity, for example 29 — instead of being redirected into 
valuable social forces, are only confirmed in their natural, 
foolish expenditure upon obvious but relatively insig 1 - 
nificant distress. The real artist wars upon such maudlin 
conventions and unrestraint. 

Contrast with the sentimentalist sort the great litera- 
ture which presents, with restraint and power, adventures 



See Chapter III, p. 95, below. 



44 READING AND LITERATURE 

in living; which does not overstate, does not attempt to 
wring false tears or force untrue values into an experience, 
but tries to' give that experience fairly and honestly, so 
that we can reconstruct and live it and sense its quality 
and meaning. Nor do the great artists assume that all 
experience is worth presenting. That which is too horrible, 
or disgusting — that from which even the keenest searcher 
after broader and deeper life turns away — is not pounced 
upon and exhibited by the artist in letters. The vile 
ravings of a maniac are no stuff for literary presentation ; 
we need force no needless realization of the lowest 
bestiality of which human nature is capable ; even the hint 
of it, to make its effect on others, is painful enough. 30 The 
presentation of the abnormal, the occasional, the excep- 
tional must justify itself for its assault upon our emotions 
by its value for interpretation of our own more everyday 
experience; it is never to be accepted for its mere thrill 
and stir of feeling. 

That tragedy of bitter experience which the inferior 
writer of that time or to-day would have exploited, Charles 
Lamb neither mentions nor even suggests in any of his 
writings. This from Pater's Appreciations 31 pays beau- 
tiful and deserved tribute: 

The writings of Charles Lamb are an excellent illus- 
tration of the value of reserve in literature. Below his 
quiet, his quaintness, his humor, and what may seem the 
slightness, the occasional or accidental character of his 
work, there lies, as I said at starting, as in his life, a genu- 
inely tragic element. The gloom, reflected at its darkest 
in those hard shadows of Rosamund Grey, is always 
there, though not always realized either for himself or his 
readers, and restrained always in utterance. It gives to 
those lighter matters on the surface of life and literature 

30 Robert Frost : " A Servant to Servants " in North of Boston. 

31 P. 124 (Macmillan, 1890). 



ENRICHMENT OF EXPERIENCE 45 

among which he for the most part moved, a wonderful 
force of expression, as if at any moment these slight 
words and fancies might pierce very far into the deeper 
soul of things. In his writing, as in his life, that quiet 
is not the low-flying of one from the first drowsy by 
choice, and needing the prick of some strong passion or 
worldly ambition to stimulate him into all the energy of 
which he is capable; but rather the reaction of nature, 
after an escape from fate, dark and insane as in old Greek 
tragedy, following upon which the sense of mere relief 
becomes a kind of passion, as with one who, having nar- 
rowly escaped earthquake or shipwreck, finds a thing for 
grateful tears in just sitting quiet at home, under the 
wall, till the end of days. 

THE PERSPECTIVE CALLED HUMOR 

Persons with a sense of humor are rather born than 
made; and yet the essentials of humor can and must be 
cultivated, especially in one's regard of himself, that last 
refuge of stupid seriousness. We have been recommended 
to " stop thinking of our thoughts and feeling of our feel- 
ings," and this is good advice ; but it is still better to learn to 
laugh at them now and then — at our pet tastes and peda- 
gogical devices and beliefs, and at our favorite failings. 
Dr. Crothers says he would make it a final test in 
every teacher's examination to " hand each candidate 
Lamb's essays on The Old and New Schoolmaster and 
on Imperfect Sympathies. I should make him read them 
to himself, while I sat by and watched. If his countenance 
never relaxed, as if he were inwardly saying That's so,' 
I should withhold the certificate. I should not consider 
him a fit person to have charge of innocent youth." 32 
You might try this on yourself. Or see whether you are 

sa S. M. Crothers: "The Mission of Humor," in The Gentle 
Reader. 



46 READING AND LITERATURE 

still humorously limber enough to enjoy thoroughly Alice 
in Wonderland or Tom Sawyer or The Bourgeois Gentle- 
man. If you can complete a graduate course in apprecia- 
tion of the quiet humor of Mr. Galsworthy's essays on 
"My Distant Relation" and "Comfort," 33 or Mr. 
Bennett's Old Wives Tale or The Title, and finally of the 
uses of the Comic Spirit, reading Meredith's The Egoist 
in the light of its opening chapter and of the Essay on 
Comedy, you will have proved yourself competent to look 
at life with a somewhat humorous, philosophic eye. Just 
as important in your association with other people, and 
particularly with children, is a real appreciation of their 
laughter and comicality and their absurd dignity. Humor 
is a sort of perspective of vision which one must cultivate 
much as one practices free-hand drawing or tone-acute- 
ness in music. 

CREATIVE INSIGHT 

Everyone appreciates and enoys the recall of all former 
experience, except the actually distressing or terrible ; and 
even that is transmuted by far remembrance. The con- 
versation at old-home days or class reunions illustrates the 
keen appeal of quite trivial remembrances. And yet the 
writer who merely retells and refurbishes an old incident 
without casting new light of perception or interpretation 
upon it does not long hold attention. His sole merit 
is a timeliness like that of personal items in vil- 
lage newspapers. 

This very slight and simple matter of our experiences, 
however, is capable in an artist's hands of transmuta- 
tion into something rich and strange. A fresh perception 
of its varied aspects, a new interpreting of its significance 
may change altogether our outlook upon every day, and 
import meaning where before we had found only triviality. 

33 John Galsworthy : The Inn of Tranquillity and A Commentary. 



ENRICHMENT OF EXPERIENCE 47 

It is the great service of the makers of genuine and im- 
portant literature that they see freshly and vividly what 
presents itself to their senses. A writer or speaker merely 
annoys us if he insists on telling us to see what we have 
already seen better than he has done. But if he can sug- 
gest new prospects for our imagination to picture, or 
fresh and unnoted details of color or movement — as of " a 
little bird's tail blown inside out by the wind," or "tints 
of Bokhara and of Samarcand " in autumn woods — then 
we listen gladly to him. 34 And if he can discover unsus- 
pected feelings or motives, fresh relations, true but 
untraced effects in the midst of what we have seen daily, 
he is of still higher service. Mr. George Bernard Shaw 
made a contribution to many people's ideas when he wrote : 
" Don't do unto others as you would that they should do 
unto you; your tastes may differ." 35 The tragic issue of 
Sir Austin Feverel's proud System and the comedy of Sir 
Willoughby Pattern's beleaguered but resolute egotism 
compel us to uncomfortable meditation. In ways like this 
our experience is enlarged, not alone in the gaining of new 
sense-impressions, but in the realm of ideas about our own 
immediate lives. 

Greatest of all, the creator of true literature sees and 
presents character in a new light ; he makes unforgettable 
an egoist or a Yankee paint manufacturer. He has, in brief, 
creative insight, the genius of noting significant details 
and as yet unperceived relations. 

On the other hand, a writer may have all the virtues 
of specific and vivid presentation of real experience, and 
yet have nothing to say that deserves our attention. A 
literary critic commented thus on a Broadway play 
last spring: 

34 This is merely what the friar-painter says in the early verses of 
Browning's " Fra Lippo Lippi," often quoted. 

* " Maxims for Revolutionists," in Man and Superman. 



48 READING AND LITERATURE 

An author takes a very unfair advantage of an audi 
ence when he introduces a sick child into his play. When 
in addition, he kills the young mother in the first act anc 
has the lonely father come up to the nursery and knee* 
beside the little boy's cot, it is like tripping up a man or 
crutches. He simply has got to fall. It is no credit tc 
the author if an audience cries at a scene like this, 36 

It is clear that the objective and faithful presentatior 
of a bit of actual experience does not, in this critic't 
opinion, at all qualify this scene to rank as great literature 
For it lacks an essential element : a significant interpreta- 
tion. It compels us to feel, or poignantly to suffer ovei 
again, an experience of which no significant meaning 01 
application is offered ; we cannot revise our outlook upon 
life in the light of it ; there is nothing we can do about it. 
Hence, we have a right to resent it as certainly not sig- 
nificant for our experience, and as possibly debilitating and 
harmful in the fashion of other assaults upon 
our emotions. 37 

We have still less patience, once we know his few 
tricks, with the artificer who merely wraps in a new tissue 
the old mystery of a crime, or puts a mechanical detective 
or lover through trite movements and passions. Conven- 
tional characters — impeccable, utterly courageous heroes 
and lovely heroines without distinguishable individuality, 
without even the very human qualities of doubt and incon- 
sistency — and trite ideas that everybody has thought for 
generations, are the best the poor story-teller can give us. 
His success may be large and loud, but it is short. Now 
and then, however, a creative artist makes the shabby 
story altogether new, by discovering unsuspected motives 
and probable but surprising results of action. These he 

36 Robert C. Blenchley, in Life, May 27, 1920. 
87 See pp. 22 ff. 



ENRICHMENT OF EXPERIENCE 49 

has derived from keen and sympathetic observation and 
by imaginative interpretation of what cannot be directly 
perceived. There is an immense distance, which we never- 
theless need much experience and trained, intelligent read- 
ing to assess rightly, between the purveyor of staled tales 
who in each generation catches the attention of the crowd, 
and the artist who presents significant experiences, because 
he puts a new personality into seeing and selecting details 
and into interpreting the actions and the interrelations of 
the whole. 

EVALUATING OUR OWN EXPERIENCE 

All this is part of the final test of literature in its effect 
upon the reader — its service in interpreting or valuing his 
own life, as a means of making him appreciative of his 
personal experience and his real worth. Significant lit- 
erature, that is, makes one examine, weigh, and estimate 
more truly his contribution to and his experience of life. 38 
Not arousing appreciation of literature itself, but insuring 
that weighing and just appreciation of one's own ex- 
perience which great literature inevitably arouses, is our 
chief business, in both reading and teaching it. To this, 
realization of what is presented in books, the fullest pos- 
sible comprehension of its meaning and significance, and 
a critical examination of its truth are obviously essential. 
Enjoyment of literary works in the conventional sense, 
Dn the other hand, is a result merely incidental to the 
greater purpose — though, as we shall see, an inevitable 
one if genuine literature, fitted to the reader's individual 
.knowledge and experience, is laid hold of. The assaying 
md interpreting of one's own share of life requires bring- 
ing all one's store of experience to literature, and necessi- 

88 John Dewey: Democracy and Education, pp. 278 ff. 
4 



5 o READING AND LITERATURE 

tates a new comprehension and criticism of both oneself 
and the book read, as aspects of significant reality. 39 

SUMMARY 

The following criteria for the evaluation of literature 
have been suggested as fundamental: 

1. Vivid concreteness or realizableness in presen- 
tation of the stuff of experience. 

2. Its truth to human experience — to the motives and 
results of thought and action — where (as in all but 
the literature of faery and fantasy or nonsense) it 
purports at all to represent life as it is. 

3. Similarly, its significance as an interpretation of 
life. — that is, its restraint of presentation and the 
creative insight of its view. 

Such tests and criteria as are here proposed for true 
literature cannot be understood from this or any other 
text, and should not be either accepted or rejected, but 
should be criticized and applied and retested. Each reader 
must create and discover their meaning for himself in 
actual experience of life and in the study of excellent 
literature. Such standards must be applied both to the 
objective picture of action and to the lyric poem or the 
reflective essay — to the Bible and the Homeric narratives, 
and to the plays of Mr. Galsworthy, the essays of Dr. 
Crothers, and the verse of Mr. Edwin Arlington Robin- 
son. Else the standards are abstract and meaningless 
statements merely. Here it is possible only to suggest 
them and to illustrate them by a few and fugitive ex- 
amples, leaving them for the reader's study and for 
application in his own attempts to estimate what he reads 
and, in the light of that, to criticize and understand his 
own experience. 

39 The subject of excellence of manner, or style, will be considered 
in Chapter II, pp. 70 ff. 



CHAPTER II 

THE TEACHER'S LITERARY EQUIPMENT 

We have spent so much time upon the tests for de- 
termining real literature because such standards are 
necessary to the teacher of literature. He must, clearly, 
help his pupils do what everyone else does mainly for his 
private good or pleasure: he must judge somehow the 
value and influence of what they read — and this not only 
within, but also outside the limits of school readings and 
of literature-books. He needs to examine and judge cur- 
rent books and magazines, particularly those addressed to 
young people and successful in holding their attention. 
Hence it is imperative that the teacher of English have 
thoroughly sound bases of literary judgment; it will not 
do for him to regard feeble, or silly, or positively harmful 
writings with half -shamed approval or with uncritical 
enthusiasm ; he must know definitely what qualities make 
for genuine and permanent excellence in literature, what 
make it indubitably worthless or pernicious. 

A. ACTUAL TEACHERS' LITERARY FAMILIARITIES AND 
PREFERENCES 

It is clearly desirable to have some specific information 
about teachers' choices of literary acquaintances. To know 
about this is equally important with discovering what sort 
of books children like and read, as we shall attempt to do 
in the following chapter. 

In the first place, any cursory examination of teachers' 
knowledge of the simplest classics, of our own and other 
literatures, leads to significant findings. It appears, first 
of all, that a clear majority of almost any group of college 

Si 



5 2 READING AND LITERATURE 

students — including college graduates — who are them- 
selves teachers of English in the grades and even in the 
high schools, display little real first-hand familiarity with 
such masterpieces as the stories of Homer and the Old 
Testament narratives in our best English translations. 
These teachers have all, of course, heard of these writings, 
are aware of their place in the literary canon, and, usually, 
have read retellings of some of them. But knowledge of 
the books themselves is actually infrequent. I do not 
maintain that it is essential — no matter how desirable — 
for every teacher, of literature in the elementary or the 
high school to have read even such major poems as Dante's 
Inferno and the Faery Queen, or such important novels as 
Tom Jones and Pendennis; but for him to be entirely 
without first-hand knowledge of, for example, Pilgrim's 
Progress and Robinson Crusoe, and of the major English 
dramas, is to have scarcely any literary equipment what- 
ever. For these are the basic excellent writings with 
which we expect grade school and high school children 
to gain thorough familiarity, and it is unfortunate to find 
many teachers who have acquaintance with them by name 
and reputation only. 

TEACHERS OF LITERATURE AND CURRENT WRITINGS 

The preferences of teachers in modern literature are 
surprising also. It is at least a sad mistake for anyone to 
suppose that the writing of prose fiction proceeded in high 
excellence for a hundred years or so and then stopped 
entirely — no less sad than to imagine that Mr. H. B. 
Wright is capable of continuing the tradition. It is even 
stranger to find it supposed that the making of poetry 
ceased suddenly at the death of Tennyson. But many 
teachers have discovered nothing of the present renais- 
sance of beautiful verse, or know only chance examples 
like In Flanders Fields. If I may judge from many 



LITERARY EQUIPMENT 53 

English teachers whom I have been able to test in this 
matter, these very suppositions as to poetry and fiction 
are widely spread among them to-day. I have found com- 
paratively few, in courses for teachers of English con- 
ducted in two universities, who could, for example, name 
a great tragedy written since Shakespeare's death, or who 
were acquainted with the best work, and not with the 
names merely, of important modern writers like Mr. 
Howells and Mr. Galsworthy, Mr. Noyes and Mr. Robert 
Frost. Practically none of these teachers had heard of 
Mr. Edwin Arlington Robinson, who is, probably, the 
most distinctive and powerful of contemporary poets, in 
America at least. In place of real familiarity with any 
writers of eminence there appears for the most part, if 
anything at all about them, mere echoes of press opinion 
and "literary" gossip. Of course it is fair to allow for 
a paralyzing effect of such questions as this asked porten- 
tously in university classes, but this influence alone can 
nardly account for so general a blankness and numbness. 

Instead of such worth-while acquaintances there was 
real regard, admitted without shame by a clear majority, 
lor such syrups and morbidities as those of Myrtle Reed's 
novels and for Mr. Dixon's and Mr. Robert Chambers's 
«ven more pernicious works. The optimistic impossibili- 
ties of the Misses Porter and, above all, the conventional 
absurdities of Mr. Harold Bell Wright were ranked by 
many of these teachers as great fiction. I need not detail 
the periodical literature regularly consumed by them. 
Only those magazines which few of them knew at all, 
:saved by name and reputation alone, were in the main 
quite worth any one's time. 

A fair, though of course quite incomplete, test of 
acquaintance with important literature — a representative 
sampling — may be made by any one who cares to examine 
the lists of novels, plays, and verse in the bibliographies for 



54 READING AND LITERATURE 

school reading in Appendix II. 1 It is regrettable that many 
teachers of literature know so excellent an American 
writer as Mrs. Wharton, if at all, only for the somewhat 
dubious atmosphere of certain of her society novels, but 
are quite ignorant of The Touchstone and of Ethan 
Frome, a power ful tragedy that seems likely to rank beside 
The Scarlet Letter as a genuine classic. And those who 
do not know the fine craftsmanship of Mr. Noyes' The 
Highwayman, or the poems of Rupert Brooke and Mr. 
Masefield and Mr. Robert Frost, to name only a few dis- 
tinguished contemporary poets, have unfairly deprived 
themselves of high pleasure and a direct acquaintance with 
literary values. 

1 have, of course, asked these questions of com- 
paratively few teachers here and there, and have given 
them only a sampling of good and bad writings to report 
their opinions upon. But it is such a selection as may prob- 
ably be trusted to give a fairly accurate picture of the 
literary likes and acquaintances of a great many teachers. 
When it is recalled that probably one-fifth of the school- 
teachers in the United States are not even graduates of 
high-schools, 2 it will be seen that in my survey of graduate 
and senior-college students I have been examining repre- 
sentatives of the top quarter, and not of the grand average, 
of our profession. 

THE TESTIMONY OF THE PROSE AND POETRY TESTS 

So far we have seen what many teachers think about 
current literature — what sort of writers they have been 
guided by publishers' advertisements to read and have 

;pp. 369. ff. 

2 David Felmley : " The Source of Supply of Teachers : " The 
National Crisis in Education, Bulletin of the United States Bureau 
of Education, 1920, No. 29 (pp. 24 ff.). The author states that prob- 
ably 22000, some 27.5 per cent of each year's supply of teachers in 
this country, begin work annually with no specific preparation for 
teaching, even in high-school courses. 



LITERARY EQUIPMENT 55 

chosen to like. It is more important to find out their esti- 
mate of actual pieces of prose and of verse which they 
meet and judge quite independently of any influence, 
whether of famous names or of standard criticism, except 
their own taste. Such an exploration has been carried 
on by Professors Allan Abbott and M. R. Trabue, of 
Teachers College, Columbia University. Mr. Abbott has 
devised, and the authors have succeeded in standard- 
izing, tests by means of which one can examine in im- 
partial and objective fashion his own literary tastes and 
preferences, as well as those of his pupils. One is thus 
now enabled to go far toward learning the quality of his 
judgments in these regions. I have found these tests of 
great value as applied to my own opinions of literary 
quality, and I recommend them to the teacher who would 
be sure of his criticism and his recommendations and of 
his power to guide and inform children's developing 
tastes. The tests now are available in published form, 
and a full account of them has appeared in the Teachers V, 
College Record? Professor Abbott has in process also 
tests on appreciation of prose paragraphs, by which other 
valuable results will probably be derived. 

The following note upon certain results of the tests is 
taken from an account of Mr. Abbott's presentation at 
the 1920 meeting of the National Council of Teachers of 
English. 4 " The test consists of a number of poems 
ranging in quality from Mother Goose to Bridges or 
Masefield, each accompanied by three versions ' spoiled ' 
by alterations, some grossly and some delicately. Each 
reader is asked to name one of the four versions as best. 
. . . One hundred and seventy-three high-school 

'Abbott and Trabtre: "A Measure of Ability to Judge Poetry," 
Teachers College Record, Columbia University, March, 1921 {22 ; 
ioi ff.) 

*Tfoe English Journal, January, 1925 (10,: 54-^)- 



56 READING AND LITERATURE 

teachers of experience were tested. For twenty-six selec- 
tions . . . only one- fourth of the teachers made a 
higher median score than the average for twelfth-year 
high-school students, whereas one- fourth of those same 
pupils did better than the average among the teachers. 
' Demolition of teacher supremacy ' in matters of taste 
was thus found to be one of the outcomes of the test." In 
fact, no teacher without exceptional taste and more than 
usually adequate education in English literature will fail 
to discover in his class pupils with distinctly better judg- 
ment than his own in matters of literary appreciation. 

It is clear that the full data of these tests will be of 
the highest significance to all who are interested in a 
real teaching of literature. No teacher can wisely evade 
an honest examination, in the light of the tests themselves, 
of his judgments of poetry. We are not likely to secure 
satisfactory results from the teaching of literature in 
grades and in high schools until the preferences and tastes 
of our teachers become more surely based in knowledge of 
essential criteria of judgment, and especially in genuine 
experience of excellent prose and poetry of every sort 
upon which to base judgment. 

I have purposely presented all the dark and none of the 
relieving light of this picture ; there were of course notable 
exceptions at the other end of the scale. I have done this 
because I want to induce a stern self-examination by ever) 
•teacher of English as to his present fitness for the work oi 
aiding pupils to broader, finer, and more truly wholesome 
experience. A false, emotional attitude toward literature 
acceptance without reflection of emotion about nothing 
at all, and of anything that sounds well iin the ear — some- 
times a shocking bad ear — appear withiunmistaka'&le clear- 
ness as the core of worst difficulty. IFor this reasor 
I urge frankness and honesty of attack -on thistproblem 
and earnest study to revalue andiairly.bas© £tur standard; 



LITERARY EQUIPMENT 57 

of taste. The sort of results recorded in the preceding 
pages, so far as they are typical of conditions in schools 
in general — and I do not honestly believe that they show 
by any means the worst conditions — are cause for 
serious disquiet. * 

B. WHAT WE OUGHT TO DO ABOUT IT 

Conditions like this are clearly far from what we can 
desire or approve; what they mean in unfortunate and 
even harmful results from classroom teaching of litera- 
ture to-day, we shall consider later. 5 But these conditions 
are merely what one must expect in view of the brief and 
not usually rich and fruitful preparation which the ma- 
jority of teachers feel they can afford to secure. At any 
rate, a teacher's realization of his inadequate equipment is 
the most hopeful of signs for his increase and growth in 
personal life and excellence of service. We all gain by 
recognizing the things we ought to have done ; " none of 
us are so good that we cannot afford to be better/' If 
we are really dissatisfied, what more can be desired save 
a knowledge of just what to do to be better? 

We may well realize that improvement comes only 
through slow and constant exertion. But it can come 
through wise expenditure of time day by day as we are 
in service and in summer study — if not as well, certainly 
no less surely than by desperate ventures of taking a year 
or two for study without pay. Moreover, while the 
" tangible rewards of teaching " will probably always be 
smaller than those of business and manufacture, they are 
being distinctly bettered to-day, and genuine improvement 
in service is measurably sure to bring increased income and 
higher positions. We can all of us well afford the earnest 
effort to find time for good reading and study in 
our profession. 

5 Pp. 217 S. " " 



58 READING AND LITERATURE 

Most of this time, we have suggested, must come in the 
course of the regular work of the school year and in vaca- 
tions. Time is now so fully absorbed in many schools, 
however, as to leave scant margin to teachers for personal 
life and growth. To combat the parsimony of school 
boards and officials, teachers should arm themselves with 
the revised Hopkins Report on the Cost and Labor of 
English teaching, 6 and campaign against over-full pro- 
grams of classes and extra duties. If we are to work 
well and efficiently, we need time for many-sided recre- 
ation — both for wholesome direct experiences and for 
excellent books. For the cheap and tawdry in literature 
or in life we can have no time under any circumstances. 
We must have the courage to put resolutely aside the third- 
and fourth-rate reading which we have found many teach- 
ers preferring. We must discard the superstition that excel- 
lent literature is always tragic or heavy. We can, we know, 
adventure into most delightful purlieus of romance and 
haunts of the comic spirit, into regions of stirring nar- 
rative verse and joyous idyl, as well as into sterner areas 
of unflinching regard upon terrible but fundamental 
reality. Our adventuring need not — it must not — be 
solemn and dutiful and of set determination. It will, if 
we have any sort of qualification for the teaching of 
English, represent hearty and enjoyable experience. 
Whoever does not find it so, whatever his pedagogical or 
other qualifications, is in all probability quite unfitted for 
the teaching of English literature. Whoever, on the other 
hand, finds genuine pleasure in the realization of true and 
significant experiences in literature will come gradually but 
surely to a firm sense for what is excellent, what merely 
bombast imitation, in prose or verse writings. By setting 

*In preparation by a committee of the National Council of 
Teachers of English, and to be published by the Bureau of Education, 
Washington, D. C. 



LITERARY EQUIPMENT 59 

one's marks well ahead and working unhurriedly but 
steadily toward them, any teacher, no matter how insuffi- 
cient his actual present equipment, may grow year by year 
into measurable adequacy of preparation for his great 
and difficult vocation. 

The remainder of this chapter is devoted to a consider- 
ation of the essential scrip and scrippage for a teacher of 
English in the grades and the high school. This material 
is presented for the purpose of enabling each one, in the 
light of its suggestions, to take a further inventory of his 
literary equipment, and then to set about definite work to 
better it. Except the first essential — the power to under- 
stand clearly what one reads in relation to various pur- 
poses — none of these requisites is to be attempted with 
severe purpose and with resolutions. The approach to 
literature, for both pupils and teachers, should be so far as 
possible unaffected and eager, not minutely critical and 
analytic or soberly earnest. The teacher who approaches 
the task of better preparation in a proper spirit of grati- 
tude, and not with solemn castigation and a martyr's air, 
is sure of increasing the adequacy and excellence of his 
service to boys and girls and of enhancing his own joy 
in life. 

As a sort of inventory of the equipment necessary for 
measurably effective teaching of English, we shall con- 
sider these topics : 

i. The necessity of really knowing how to read 

2. The need of variety and depth of first-hand 

experience 

3. The equal necessity of much experience of excellent 

literature 

4. Discovery of what the writer is trying to do — a 

knowledge of major classifications of literature 



6o READING AND LITERATURE 

5. An equipment of real knowledge of periods and of 

essential literary influences 

6. Consequent power to discover and apply for one- 

self such valid criteria of literary excellence as 
have already been suggested and discussed. 7 



- 



I. KNOWING HOW TO READ 



We have already found that real experience in litera- 
ture, like real experience anywhere else, is an affair of 
give and take; you cannot get anything from a book or 
from a person save as you bring to the experience some- 
thing of attentive inquiry and also of intelligent com- 
munity of former experience. As we shall note presently, 
ia rich and varied outfit of real experience is unquestion- 
ably the first essential of getting further and greater ex- 
perience from literature. But there is also much to learn 
about how to bring that equipment to bear. If we have 
practiced and gained some mastery of essentials in the 
technique of reading, and particularly if we are consciously 
in control of our minds in the process, we are the more 
skilful in translating black marks on white paper into new 
arrangements of our past experience. We know how to 
get the substance of what we read. 

In other words, as teachers of literature, we really 
need to know how to read. Our assumption that we learned 
that in the primary grades is common and regrettable. 
Really intelligent people are all the time continuing to learn 
to read, and making constant new discoveries in that 
domain. It will be the business of a later section of this 
study 8 to present certain principles and practices that ap- 
pear to be necessary to intelligent reading and study. It is 
obviously essential for any teacher to know and master 

T See F. T. Baker : " The Teacher of English," English Journal 
II, 335 ; also the bibliography in Appendix I, pp. 343 below. 
8 Chapters V and VI. 



LITERARY EQUIPMENT 61 

these himself, by thoughtful practice and criticism of his 
own performance, before he attempts to teach reading. 
Yet in this, as well as in appreciation and discrimination, 
teachers do not invariably measure up to a high and ex- 
acting standard. Failure actually to read for realization 
and interpretation must account for some of the failures 
in Professor Abbott's prose and poetry tests. 

^2. VARIETY AND DEPTH OF FIRST-HAND EXPERIENCE 

Obviously whoever would read well must be supplied 
also with many and rich experiences, the richer and more 
various the better. To those who have these, come more 
experiences in profusion, from books and pictures and 
from every contact with life; but to those with few and 
pallid adventures little real reading is possible. The good 
teacher of literature is first of all one who has " proved " 
many things — who has keenness after experience — some- 
what like the small children who deliberately burned their 
tongues with hot iron to sense a new thing. 9 As one grows 
up, to be sure, increasing common sense, responsibility, and 
realization of what is socially and individually desirable 
will increasingly limit such direct experiences. The pos- 
sibilities of trying things out in imagination and so dis- 
covering their results, instead of crudely blundering upon 
the results — what Professor Palmer aptly names an "apti- 
tude for vicar iousness " — will lengthen one's probability 
of peaceful and lasting life without too much cramping 
his range of adventure. The good of books is their con- 
tribution to such " vicarious experiencing." 

But the fact remains that whoever would gain from 
literature what great writers have put into it must be a 
live, adventurous person who fares forth avid for the 
various taste of life. " The makers of literature are those 
who have seen and felt the miraculous interestingness of 

* Max Eastman : The Enjoyment of Poetry, p. 9 (Scribner's, 1913). 



62 READING AND LITERATURE 

the universe." 10 So, of course, are the true appreciators 
of it; their attitude toward experience must be the same. 
One who would rightly enjoy and savor real literature 
must be like Rupert Brooke, a lover of : 

" Wet roofs, beneath the lamplight ; the strong crust 
Of friendly bread ; and many tasting food ; 
Rainbows, and the blue bitter smoke of wood. . . - 11 

They must take in life at all their senses, its discomforts 
and hardnesses, too — the hardness of dull necessary work ( 
and of resolute persistence in face of weariness and pain — 
as well as the pleasant things. 

In addition to learning by direct experience, such a per- 
son learns much also by observation of other people, and 
from the living literature in the mouths of men w r ho 
have had wider and deeper contacts with life than his own. 
Even if he cannot collect ancient ballads from Border 
peasants or Nova Scotian craftsmen he can get from men 
of full and adventurous life many casual glimpses into 
ways of life and thought quite foreign to his own. If he 
has the imagination and appreciation which are essential 
to truest enjoyment of literature, he will undoubtedly tell 
himself, or, better, write many small fictions about the 
people he sees in elevated trains or department stores, 12 
and compose fragments of verse, and get the frankest pos- 
sible criticism of what he does. For whoever would under- 
stand the work of any author must be not sharply critical 
and analytic, but" chiefly sympathetic and constructive in 
his approach to the authors work. Having made a like 
attempt is the surest route to such sympathy. 

"Arnold Bennett: Literary Taste and How to Form It, p. n. 

""The Great Lover," Collected Poems, (Lane, 1915). 

"See Charles Baudelaire's "The Windows," Pastels in Prose, 
(Harper, 1890). 



LITERARY EQUIPMENT 63 

All this is being a person of real experience, capable of 
manifold contacts with literature. 13 To such a person, and 
only in the degree that one is such a person,* literature 
offers indefinite and multiform enhancement of life. The 
Tartarin who surrenders adventure because of the perils 
of rheumatism and covers himself warm in bed 
is quite unable to appreciate the hardships and triumphs 
of Odysseus. 14 

Most of us are unequipped by nature for hearing in 
imagination the gorgeous symphonies and assuaging 
harmonies which attended Mozart or Rolland's Jean- 
Christophe everywhere. The artist's keen perception finds 
lovely color where the rest of us see only drab or black 
shadow. Even in discovering subtle fragrances of plant 
and of moist earth we feel, in reading Mr. Galsworthy, a 
distinct limitation in ourselves. But the writer of real 
perception does us, at any r-ate, the service of making us 
conscious of our lack, and, at best, of arousing us to 
sharper attention and so to fuller living in these worlds 
of sense. 

Those who themselves have had no vividness and 
variety of experience cannot hope to derive and apply valid 
standards for judging the truth or the reality of literary 
experiences. They cannot rightly distinguish between the 
actuality of life in characters and action, and the mere 
trick of harrying emotions without anything genuine to 
feel about, as in certain stanzas from the poetry tests, or 
in the manner of Nick Bottom's Bombast : 

The grinding rocks 

And shivering shocks 
Shall break the locks 

Of prison gates. 

13 G. E. Woodberry: The Appreciation of Literature, pp. 15 ft*. 
"Alphonse Daudet: Tartarin of Tarascon. 



64 READING AND LITERATURE, 

The woes and blisses of wooden-doll lovers, altogether 
conventional and without any least individuality — such 
beings as Mr. Wright and the Mr. Curwood turn out by 
dozens — are convincing to persons who have known none 
of the deeper possibilities of human comradeship. But 
whoever has sensed genuine happiness and genuine sorrow 
is, perhaps, less likely to be misled by mock emotion or 
staled passion tattered in dialogue. 

3. MUCH GENUINE EXPERIENCE OF EXCELLENT 
LITERATURE 

In addition to fulness and variety of experience at first 
hand, but by no means as a substitute for life, it is 
obviously necessary that one who would judge literature 
with reasonable sureness should know the writings which, 
like " the raft that Homer made for Helen," 15 have en- 
dured and survived the tempests of centuries. From these 
alone he can discover, in actual and experimental and not 
merely perfunctory fashion, what are the essential quali- 
ties of greatness in literature. And this is simply because 
whatever has been really enjoyed by any considerable 
number of people, both in different times and in various 
places, must have in itself some permanent power 
of reality. 

This does not mean that in order to be possessed of 
literary taste and appreciation one must have read certain 
ordered lists of the world's masterpieces. Still less should 
it be supposed that anyone is expected to like all admitted 
classics. Deep-rooted tastes — a misliking of blood and 
battle, or of historical romances — may unfortunately but 
surely limit any person's adventurings, as did Tartarin's 
rheumatism. One is just so much the poorer for this ; but 
his experience may flourish the more in other directions. 

Mere timidity or sloth limiting one's actual and even 

"Lord Dunsany: Fifty-one Tales— "The Raft." 



LITERARY EQUIPMENT 65 

more his literary experiences is always most inexcusable. 
Certainly acquaintance with all the poetry and drama and 
fiction which are great and simply understandable enough 
to be included in good high-school lists of required reading 
—that in Appendix II, 16 for example — and some compre- 
hension of why these things have been accounted great, is 
surely a fair requirement for every teacher to make reso- 
lutely and earnestly of himself. It is highly to be desired, 
of course, that he really know, as well — by his own intel- 
ligent reading, and not by report and lecture only — the 
materials collected in survey courses in literature, 17 par- 
ticularly if he is in charge of junior high school classes 
in English. 

It seems impossible to suppose that anyone will teach 
literature adequately in senior high school without a real 
familiarity with material read in the common period 
courses given to undergraduates, and very desirable is a 
thorough acquaintance, preferably in graduate study, with 
at least some one period of English literature. Whoever 
lacks such preparation can do a good deal by himself to 
make it up, provided he reads with an earnest and intelligent 
attempt to realize what is presented; mere running the 
eyes over page after page is worse than nothing for this 
purpose. This achievement of mastery is of course a 
privilege rather than a piece of drudgery. 

4. MAJOR CLASSIFICATIONS OF LITERATURE 

Of very great value in forming and applying such 
standards of criticism as we have been considering is, in 
approaching any piece of literature, an intelligent attitude 

"Pp. 369, 5T 

" Such collections as Newcomer and Andrews' Twenty Centuries 
of English Poetry and Prose, Pancoast's English Prose 'and Verse, 
or the Century Readings in English Literature by Cunliffe, Pyre, and' 
Young; Pattee's American Literature, and The Great Tradition by 
Greenlaw and Hanford. 



66 READING AND LITERATURE 

of inquiry as to what the author is trying to do. A great 
part of the misteaching of literature has probably risen 
from confusing it with other sorts of writing whose pur- 
pose is to convey knowlege. For discovering the real 
purpose of the writer some knowledge also of the major 
classifications of literature is helpful. We have already 
found valuable De Quincey's famous, fundamental dis- 
tinction between the literature oLknowledge, one of whose 
criteria is scientific truth or historical fidelity ; and the lit- 
erature- of^power, whose concern is an imaginative recon- 
struction of experience which shall be true to human 
nature and to the results of human action. 18 

One should know also what constitutes true poetry, as 
distinct from mere versification and from prose. The 
best introductions to this question, of special value to the 
teacher of literature, are Dr. Crothers' essay on The 
Enjoyment of Poetry 19 and Max Eastman's book of the 
same name. 20 The distinction made by Mr. Eastman be- 
tween the prosaic and the poetic person, and the writer's 
treatment of the poetic, adventure-seeking quality in ex- 
perience, already referred to, are fundamental. Mr. 
Laurence Housman follows a similar line of distinction 
when he defines poetry as " simple condensed utterance 
tinged with emotion." 21 It will be seen that both these 
delimitations are somewhat the same as that of the litera- 
ture of power. A fuller idea of poetic forms can be had 
from an article on " Poetry " in the Encyclopedia Britan- 
nica, which shows the various ways that different peoples 

18 Thomas De Quincey. Essay on Pope. 
18 S. M. Crothers : In The Gentle Reader. 

"Max Eastman: The Enjoyment of Poetry (New York, 1013V 
"Laurence Housman: "Reality in Poetry," Living Age, 272: 
204, (January 27, 1912.) 



LITERARY EQUIPMENT °7 

have indicated rhythms in verse, and from Professor 
Brander Matthews' Study of Versification. 

A grouping of literature into categories of poetry 
— epic, lyric and dramatic (the Aristotelian group- 
ing) ; of prose — history, orations, biographies, let- 
ters, essays, novels, and short stories — is convenient. 
Professor Smith 22 wisely suggests that reading " only a 
few standard specimens of each of these types " and then 
trying " to put into plain language how each type differs 
from every other " constitutes an important step in under- 
standing and appreciating the whole question of liter- 
ary form. 

One probably need not go into further classifications 
and divisions so far as any direct use in teaching literature 
in grades and high school is concerned. Moreover, to the 
degree that a teacher conceives of his knowledge in this 
subject as a means of impressing pupils with his erudition 
or, worse yet, as subject matter for them merely to mem- 
orize and recite upon, he would better be without the 
information. It may be noted in passing that the teacher 
of literature can get on better without any classifications 
of figures of speech. As Professor C. S. Baldwin once 
remarked, the origin of these classify ings provides 
" material for an interesting study in abnormal psy- 
chology;" their perpetuation in schools seems a clear 
example of the control of unreflective imitation and 
custom. It is difficult to imagine why anyone ever sup- 
posed that it is important for high-school pupils to know 
more than that figures are comparisons, direct or implied. 
To note the comparison is often interesting and well 
repays us ; beyond that, nothing is of any apparent value. 

23 C. Alphonso Smith: What Can Literature Do for Me? Chap- 
ter VI. 



68 READING AND LITERATURE 

5. REALIZATION OF LITERARY PERIODS AND ESSENTIAL 
INFLUENCES 

What is usually more to the teacher's purpose than 
any extended knowledge of literary classifications is a real 
understanding of the time in which a great piece of litera- 
ture was written and of the influence which the times and 
people had upon the author and his work. But there is 
need of selecting most carefully what is here relevant to 
our purpose from huge masses of available data. Scholar- 
ship leads into amassing interesting but often tenuously 
related acts about texts and biography and minor influ- 
ences which must be considered carefully to reveal their 
essential contribution to the high-school class in literature. 

The importance of such knowledge as bears signifi- 
cantly upon one's subject can be well illustrated by the case 
of the Elizabethan period. The assiduous researches of 
scholars into the minutest and least promising sources — 
reports of trials at law, expense accounts, building con-* 
tracts and property transfers, and even the most shallow 
and stupid writings of the period — have combined to make 
possible an unequalled picture of the men for whom 
Shakespeare and others w r rote, of the theatres and their 
actor-owners, and of the playwrights and players of the 
time. A sense of the remarkable change in teaching 
Shakespeare effected by this means may be had by anyone 
who compares editions and criticism of twenty years ago 
and now. 23 Largely through the influence of Professor 
Brander Matthews this information has been brought to 
bear so as to quite reconstitute the teaching of these plays 
in many high schools. 

So for the reading of poems and fiction, from The 
Deserted Village to Clay hanger : it is impossible to under- 
stand most of these rightly until one knows something of 

33 F. T. Baker: "Shakespeare in the Schools," English Journal, 
V,299- 



LITERARY EQUIPMENT 69 

the trend of the long but fruitless struggle in England 
against enclosing the common land, and of the effects of 
the industrial revolution upon all life there. 24 Modern 
literature cannot of course be understood until one has a 
great deal of knowledge about social and labor unrest, the 
deeper causes of the Great War, and the effect of these 
things on the thought of literary men. 

This suggests how many-sided the knowledge of a 
teacher of English needs to be. He cannot specialize nar- 
rowly in a subject, but must be acquainted with the trend 
of thought in history and sociology, in the arts and the 
sciences. Acquaintance with technical processes and with 
professional practice and with the church service is not 
out of place. But this brings us directly to recollection 
of the kindly satire of Lamb's The Old and the New 
Schoolmaster. If one's familiarity is mere information, 
valued for itself and inflicted on pupils or other helpless 
persons, it is simply a nuisance. When newly and con- 
sciously acquired it is likely to be thus abused. Genuine 
experience of many sides of human thought, seen in reason- 
able perspective and never intruded, but ready at request 
and genuine need, is of great and constant value; and this 
cannot be substituted for by hasty appeal to reference 
books ; it can only be supplemented by them. 

In like manner good biography can throw much light 
upon the work of a man and clear its obscurities. 25 But 
when this is taken to justify a long and dreary recital of 
dates and facts in the introduction of a high-school text, 
the value of biography becomes the sheerest fiction. The 
teacher is under obligation here also to know all he 
can of the researches of scholars into the life and times of 

24 Much information of this kind is given, in tabular form, in 
Reynolds and Greever's The Facts and Background of Literature, 
(New York, 1920). 

23 F. H. Hayward: The Lesson in Appreciation, Chapter IX, es- 
pecially pp. 105 ff. 



70 READING AND LITERATURE 

writers, that he is to help his class comprehend. But he is 
equally required to select from this mass only the details 
essential for his purpose: a real experience of the piece of 
literature by his pupils, and their grasp of its chief point 
and vital meaning. For the teacher must be not only a 
scholar, as far as in him lies, in and beyond the limited 
field he is to teach; he must be also an artist in bringing to 
bear what he has gathered from the scholarship of others, 
upon his problem of aiding in the interpretation of, the 
literature which enriches experience. 

6. CONSEQUENT COMMAND OF VALID CRITERIA OF 
EXCELLENCE 

We have so far considered the obligation of the 
teacher of English to have real acquaintance with life and 
with excellent writings, and knowledge of the forms and 
influences of literature. All this brings us back once more 
to the criteria of literary excellence discussed in the last 
chapter. For only as one has other qualifications of 
experience and understanding can he either comprehend 
or intelligently apply these or any other standards. Just 
so far as he is capable of testing effectively the reality, the 
truth, and the significance of classic and of current 
writings, he is measurably equipped for a career of 
genuine usefulness in the English classroom, 

A SENSE OF THE RELATION OF EXCELLENT MANNER OR 
STYLE TO LITERATURE 

We have, however, considered the question of literary 
excellence so far wholly from the point of view of its 
matter — the experience it tries to present; nothing has 
been said about style or structure, the manner of treat- 
ment. And this, it seems to me, is as it should be for our 
purposes. For since the aim here assumed for teaching 
literature is the gaining of real and excellent experience, 



LITERARY EQUIPMENT 71 

the broadening and deepening of perceptions of life 
through literature, it would certainly be more important, if 
we could consider the questions but one at a time, to center 
on the subject matter of the experience rather than on the 
fineness or inferiority of its dress. 

But an added consideration in favor of the criteria we 
have proposed is furnished by several recent significant 
discussions of the problem. They propose not alone that 
consideration of style is inseparable from that of the mat- 
ter presented, but that excellence of style or structure is 
wholly dependent upon the quality of subject matter. The 
point is most vigorously presented in two sentences in the 
preface to Un Pere Prodigue by Dumas the Younger : 

"No one ever perishes because of his form ; he lives or 
dies according to the matter . . . Expression will 
always, in spite of one's desires, equal thought: it will be 
just and firm if the thought is great; feeble and bombastic 
if the thought is vulgar or common." 26 

The point for our present purpose appears to be this : 
If a story in verse or prose, a lyric poem, an essay is well 
grounded in true experience and in individual, intelligent 
reflection on that experience, it is measurably certain to be 
well organized and expressed in worthy style. An idea 
that is trite and hackneyed cannot but be expressed in 
hackneyed and staled phrases. For emotion that is un- 
true — forced or exaggerated or insincere — the wording 
and the sentence movement can hardly rise above the 
ideas ; it will be cheap and bizarre or vaguely general, as, 
for example, in Mr. Churchill's description. 27 

88 Translated by Barrett H. Clark — Drama No. 25, February, 
1017. An excellent statement of the same point is made by John 
Drinkwater in his Introduction to The Dramatic Works of St. John 
Hankin (London, 1912), pp. 8-9. There is also the well-known com- 
ment by Wordsworth : " It is in the highest degree unphilosophic to 

call language or diction the dress of our thought It is the 

incarnation of our thought" 

87 Pp. 25 ft. 



72 READING AND LITERATURE 

The immeasurable distance in literary excellence be- 
tween " Gee! isn't that lovely? " and Wordsworth's lines: 

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns : 
And the round ocean, and the living air 

is quite clearly a difference between thin poverty and deep 
richness of idea, rather than differing artistry of ex- 
pression merely. An unusually clear illustration of the 
expression of insincere and of true emotion is given by a 
contrast of the speech of Macbeth when Duncan's murder 
is discovered — that carefully planned, embroidered, and 
elaborate speech — with Macduff's reply to a conventional 
condolence on Lady Macduff's death : 

..... But I must also feel it as a man. 
I cannot but remember such things were, 
That were most pleasant to me. 

The one is fanciful verbiage attempting to cover up guilt, 
the other honest and deep emotion finding its natural 
expression. 

Truth to human experience and concreteness of detail 
are then proposed as the main roots of excellent manner 
as well as of worthy matter. The other half of this truth, 
more frequently stated, is of course of equal validity. To 
attempt to present one's ideas in unconcern as to their 
form is obviously to neglect an essential part of the process 
of thinking them through. The discipline of conforming 
to convention, and particularly of adapting expression to 
purpose, is a basic part of the cultivation and enrichment 
of ideas — a part which the slack and formless artist omits 
to his certain destruction. But for our purpose as students 
and teachers of literature, I propose, this point is of less 
significance than to the artist in letters, or the critic, 
or the teacher of advanced composition. 28 

28 The opposite view is vigorously set forth in E. A. Greening- 
Lamborn's The Rudiments of Criticism, pp. 120 ff. 



LITERARY EQUIPMENT 73 

Moreover, the whole question of style must be consid- 
ered less as a problem of adapting and fitting manner to 
natter — as we have seen it is inevitably and inseparably 
itted; it must be considered more as a problem of fitting 
expression to clear understanding by and memorable 
effect upon the actual readers or hearers addressed. Lit- 
erature with what is called universal appeal — not neces- 
sarily appeal to every man, but to many sorts of men in 
various times and places — is characterized not only by 
.oncreteness or objectivity, but by simplicity and homely 
iineness. There is a story of Lincoln's boyhood which 
comments sagely on this point and probably gives at least 
i partial explanation of his great power as speaker and 
vriter. Lincoln is represented as saying that he always 
elt troubled by the spread-eagle oratory of the day and 
>y much of the talk of the neighbors, because he felt that 
le was failing to understand something greatly worth 
vhile. He goes on : "I could not sleep, though I often 
; ried to, when I got on such a hunt after an idea, until I 
iiad caught it ; and when I thought I had got it, I was not 
satisfied until I had repeated it over and over, until I had 
DUt it into language plain enough, as I thought, for any 
>oy I knew to comprehend." 29 He was cultivating, through 
his earnest attempt to adapt his expression to a particular, 
lomely audience, that fine luminous style which marks 
him as a master of English. 

IN SUMMARY 

This long discussion has pointed to but one issue 
;hroughout — such equipment of the teacher of English as 
vvill fit him for selecting valuable literary experiences and 
tor helping his pupils really to gain those experiences in a 
vital and not merely formal fashion. We have proposed 

23 Quoted by C. A. Smith: What Can Literature Do for Me? 
P- 3- 



74 READING AND LITERATURE 

that the teacher must at all cost gain an understanding of 
basic criteria of literary excellence — specifically, of its 
concrete realizability and of its truth and significance in 
portrayal of life. We have found that such citeria can be 
really mastered only through both wide and sincere ex- 
perience, and familiarity with excellent literature. We 
have suggested that the teacher needs also a fair equipment 
of knowledge of literary types, literary periods, and essen- 
tials of biography. 

Only with such a background is any one in a position 
to decide, with some reasonable chance of being right, 
upon the value of current writings. He is less likely to be 
swept off his feet by the hectic emotional appeal of the 
present generation of novelists and post-war hymnologists 
of hatred. He may hope to escape being fooled — he must 
escape it — by cheap doing-over of staled situations and 
meaningless, conventional characters. He has put him- 
self in the way to achieve some sense of poetic quality, so 
that he can select what is genuine and honest from mere- 
tricious clap-trap. With at least this modicum of equip- 
ment, which of course is indefinitely extensible, it is pos- 
sible for the teacher to make intelligent use of what he can 
learn about children's actual reading interests, for helping 
them select more excellent matter and really make it a part 
of their experience. 



CHAPTER III 

BEGINNING WITH CHILDREN'S ACTUAL 
EXPERIENCES AND INTERESTS 

The purpose of this chapter is to consider how we 
can find out where children actually are in experience, and 
consequently in interest in books, when we set to work 
with them in the grades or the high school. But before we 
attempt this problem it seems necessary to state, simply 
and barely, three educational principles on which the re- 
mainder of this study is wholly based. They are derived 
chiefly from the educational writings of Dr. E. L. Thorn- 
dike and Dr. John Dewey. The chapters to follow are 
principally an attempt to illustrate clearly the meaning and 
applications of these principles. No attempt will be made 
to argue the points ; these must be proved or disproved in 
laboratory studies and in classroom teaching day by day. 

A. THREE FUNDAMENTAL EDUCATIONAL PRINCIPLES 
I. WE MUST BEGIN WHERE CHILDREN ACTUALLY ARE 

First, we must begin where pupils actually are, in ex- 
perience and knowledge and skill, if we would get them 
anywhere. This seems, perhaps, too obvious to require 
mention; but, as this and the fifth chapter will show, its 
real application requires much study and readjustment of 
courses and methods. 

2. WE MUST SECURE ALTOGETHER SIGNIFICANT AND 
VALUABLE MATERIALS OF STUDY 

Second, we must require in our courses of study both 
knowledge and skill that are thoroughly and altogether 
worth while, both from a social point of view and from 

75 



76 READING AND LITERATURE 

that of our pupils now. This seems even more necessary 
than the first point. But studies and tasks required as 
discipline are sometimes urged even to-day, in spite of the 
fact that most of us find the essential tasks quite amply 
disciplinary. Altogether adult skill and knowledge and 
appreciation, too, are forced upon children as preparation 
for a more or less problematic future. And, on the other 
hand, there has been a reaction toward following the bent 
and whim of children in education, with frequently dis- 
astrous results. Much very careful study is needed to 
discover what is really valuable — what experiences in lit- 
erature and what points of knowledge and of skill, in 
reading for example, are so excellent and significant as to 
be unquestionably worth our pupils' time, in view of both 
their immediate and their later needs. We do not, of 
course, mean merely matters of bread-and-cheese utility. 

3. WE MUST HELP PUPILS TO REALIZE THE IMMEDIATE 
WORTH OF OUR SUBJECT 

Third, we need to present this worth in such fashion 
that it will be definitely realizable as worth, by the children 
we have to deal with. Here we need to emphasize 
particularly the futility of telling, and the great force of 
demonstration; if we show our pupils the immediate 
worth to them of reading quickly and with understanding, 
in their school arithmetics or in books that appeal to their 
interest, we shall need to do less profitless talking on this 
subject. Whatever difficulty this occasions is richly 
repaid; for in so far as we succeed in this, the prob- 
lem of discipline and compulsion to study vanishes. The 
machine goes of its own power, and we do not need to crank 
it once every mile. That is to say, we are not compelled 
to the unpleasant alternatives of ( 1 ) forcing children to 
study by posing such unpleasant consequences of failure 



CHILDREN'S EXPERIENCES 77 

as shame, detention, or punishment, or (2) inveigling 
them into work by allurements of personal charm, follow- 
ing their random interests, or attempting hectic and re- 
vivalistic arousal to effort. All these methods wear us out, 
and distract attention from the main business of school: 
good hard work to master genuine and not merely 
trumped-up difficulties — real problems to be solved, valu- 
able skill to be gained, or fine and wholesome experience 
to be enjoyed. 1 

B. ON KNOWING REAL CHILDREN 

Anyone who is to teach literature effectively has 
obvious need for knowledge of real children. Those who 
have wanted to understand children have frequently 
studied " the child " in pedagogical books. Much of great 
value can be gleaned from some of these — the rather 
miscellaneous assortment of material in Dr. Hall's Ado- 
lescence, for instance; it has been remarked that Mr. 
Tarkington's Seventeen reads like a clever vivifying of 
parts of that book. Certainly more profitable is the well 
organized and scientifically based presentation of con- 
clusions in The Psychology of Childhood by Nors worthy 
and Whitley. 2 The one treatment of fundamental im- 

1 These last points (Nos. 2 and 3) are frequently called by the 
names problem method, project method or problem-project method of 
teaching; whatever they are called, they appear to be the most effec- 
tive means of combating the " force-feeding" and despotic dictation 
in many schools, as well as the anarchy of building curriculums on 
children's mere chance interests. The philosophy upon which these 
principles are built up is presented most cogently in the following 
references, which are of great value to teachers : 

John Dewey: The School and Society (University of Chicago 
Press, 1915). 

John Dewey: Democracy and Education (Macmillan, 1917). 

W. H. Kilpatrick: "The Project Method" Teachers College 
Record, September, 1918 and (a symposium) September, 1921. 
a Chapters I- VI (Macmillan, 1918). 



78 READING AND LITERATURE 

portance to every teacher is undoubtedly Dr. Thorn- 
dike's richly packed and wittily presented chapters on The 
Original Nature of Man* 

CHILDREN IN LITERATURE 

It is not from scientific studies, however, nor even in 
literature, that one can best gain knowledge of real chil- 
dren, but from children themselves; yet illumination of 
greater insight upon one's own observations is contributed 
by the best presentations of child life in stories. The 
children of Mark Twain and Maurice Hewlett and Mrs. 
Bacon and Mrs. Fisher are often quite real persons. 
Properly regarded, they throw useful light upon the sort 
of behavior that otherwise may puzzle us in actual chil- 
dren's doings. The list of such books in Appendix I * 
contains many that are rewarding to browse among, pro- 
vided one also studies and interprets real children by the 
aid of these children of literature. 

SOCIAL LIVING WITH CHILDREN 

The best recourse is undoubtedly living with children 
as one of them. If one can really do this with genuine 
sympathy and understanding, and not with futile pre- 
tense, most of the problems of literature teaching and of 
schools in general will take a different color. That this 
must be done with sense and caution it is easy and obvious, 
but rather futile, to say. But where there is in the class- 
room a truly social spirit of working all together, and not 
mere formal recitation of requirements, where there is 
genuine conversation and discussion of real problems to 

3 E. L. Thorndike: Educational Psychology, vol. i, ctu 1-17; or 
Briefer Course (1914) ch. 1-9. 

*Pp- 347, ff. / • 



CHILDREN'S EXPERIENCES 79 

lich every one gives his own best thought, the teacher 
n learn much about his friends the pupils. Some ac- 
: unts of good procedures of this sort are also referred to 
the bibliographies. 5 

The teacher can also learn much from that sort of com- 
1 sition which is literature in little. 6 Class discussions of 
teresting adventures in the children's own lives some- 
nes arouse youngsters to those vivid themes about their 
eferences and observations and ideas which are, to 
em, precisely what greater literature is to the literary 
tist — expression of his individual experience as the 
-iter himself has sensed it. Often these themes are writ- 
1 chiefly for the sake of self-expression, and to be shared 
th real friends only. When a teacher is made one of 
that audience, it is a real compliment, and affords him op- 
portunity to learn much of value to his craft. He has been 
initiated into the select world of children, like Uncle 
Paul in Mr. Blackwood's story, 7 and stands on a dif- 
ferent footing with them henceforward. 

A teacher's response and criticism must be completely 
sincere, and he needs to be uncannily wise in encouragement 
of whatever is healthy and sound and in diversion of at- 
tention from morbid overstrained emotion and from 
absurdity of random fancy. He must also exercise great 
care that he does not shut out the greater part of his pupils, 
because their ideas and experiences seem to him common- 
place, in his sole interest in a few who have special ability 
and so the less need of his ministry — although these pupils 
are of course the young people whose work and influence 
may be widest, who are in one sense the most worth 

5 Appendix I, pp. 344, ff., 360, ff. 
• See Chapter IX. 
'Algernon Blackwood: The Education of Uncle Paul (Holt, 1910). 



80 READING AND LITERATURE 

helping. The values of this kind of composition fc 
aiding children to interpret and appreciate greater liten 
ture will come in for discussion later. Here they ai 
noted for their contribution to the teacher's knowledge c 
the particular child natures that he has to deal with. 

c. children's actual choices of books 

One thing that teachers need to study and undei 
stand far more than they often have done is the readin 
choices that most children make when they are quite f re* 
We need to know what they actually do like. A teache 
is inclined to assume that he knows all about this, becaus 
his pupils have stated in class what he supposes are genuir 
opinions about the required readings. Quite frequently 
too, these opinions are not intentionally insincere. The 
are simply colored by a knowledge of the teacher's pr< 
dilections and of course by the sway of his personal er 
thusiasms. But such echoings of criticism from te? 
books and adaptations to the views of teachers are in fact 
mainly without meaning; they are never without poss: 
bilities of hurtful insincerity and, in reaction, may lea d 
to worse choices than ever. We need to find out what th 
same children do indeed read when they are not unde 
the teacher's eye, what they spontaneously choose an 
enjoy and recommend heartily to one another. And thi 
sort of thing the teacher must know before he can wor 
with any real effect in the teaching of literature. 

Dr. A. M. Jordan has made a useful contribution her : 
in a thesis recently published. 8 The most useful sectio 
of his study concerns the favorite books in public librarie 
— those that children hid behind the volumes of poetry s 

8 A. M. Jordan : Children's Interests in Reading — Teachers Collegi 
Columbia University, Contributions to Educational Theory, 1921. 



CHILDREN'S EXPERIENCES 



81 



that they might find them undisturbed when they came 
back to read, those so constantly in circulation that they 
were in frequent need of rebinding. His list of such 
books follows: 

From Children's Interests in Reading by Dr. A. M. 
Jordan, Chapter III, pp. 110-119. 

Favorite authors in public libraries, as judged by a total point score 
made up of number of times books were charged out, rebound, ap- 
plied for in advance, duplicated, waited in line for, and the like. 



BOYS' BOOKS FICTION 

Altsheler 1,201 

Barbour 689 

T o m 1 i n s o n (war, 

scouting) 367 

Burton (scouts) 252 

Clemens 236 

Henty 192 

Pudley (school) 163 

Munroe 125 

Heyliger (scouts) .. 119 

Quick (scouts) 99 

Followed at intervals 
by Doyle (71), Grin- 
nell (50), Paine 
(39), Dumas, Hugo 
(12), Jungle Books, 
Dickens, Scott (10). 
(Author notes The 
Call of the Wild as 
popular, but I don't 
find it in these lists.) 
6 



GIRLS BOOKS FICTION 

Alcott 538 

Richards (Peggy) . . 212 

Wiggin 209 

Burnett (unusual 

kindliness) 186 

Sidney (Peppers) . . . 184 
Woolsey (In the 

High Valley) 173 

Deland (Katrina) 159 

Montgomery 119 

Knipe (Maid of Old 

Manhattan) 92 

Rankin (Adopting of 

Rosa Marie) 92 

Carroll, T a g g a r t, 
Vaile, Jacobs (Joan's 
Jolly Vacation), Dix, 
Porter (Polly anna), 
Dodge, Webster, 
Spyri, Craik, Stowe, 
Rice, S e w e 1 1 
(forty-fifth in serial 
number). 



8>2 



READING AND LITERATURE 



BOYS — NON-FICTION 

Boy Scout Handbook 103 
About Lincoln (Nico- 
lay, Cravens, Moore, 
Baldwin) 62 



Collins, Airplanes . 

DuChaillu 

Old Stories of the 

East (Baldwin) 
Harper Handy Books 
Life of Washington 

(Brooks, Hill) .. 

Dan Beard 

Buffalo Bill 

Hill : Grant and Lee 
Eastman (Indian) 
Hill : Fighting Fire 
Almost no travel 

books. 
St. Nicholas most 

popular magazine ; 

Popular Mechanics 

second. 



58 
55 

40 
34 

27 

23 
22 
10 
10 



GIRLS — NON-FICTION 

JEsop 28 

Dalbreath, Varney, 
Walker (Little 
Pla ys) 13 

Lamb, Keller, Har- 
per Handy Books. . 10 

"Little Cook/' "Days 
and Deeds," Gale, 
"Story of Ulysses," 
"Pied Piper" 8 

Rip van Winkle .... 7 

How to Dress a Doll. 6 

Steadman (Jeanne 
d'Arc) 6 

A m b r o s i (girlhood 
i n Italy) 5 

Note that no books, 
particularly with 
non-fiction, scored 
as high in the girls' 
as in the boys' table. 



To many teachers this may prove no revelation, but 
to those whose pupils have expressed admiration for 
Bryant and Scott in school, only to race to the library 
on their release to secure the latest volume of Tarzan or 
the " Motor Girls " series, the facts discovered in this in- 
vestigation should be most useful. It should be sufficiently 
clear that the teacher who does not know at first hand the 
writings of the authors most popular with boys and girls 
of the ages he is teaching should lose no time in forming 
such acquaintances. Without that he certainly is not 
equipped to recommend to his pupils books that have equal 
appeal and superior quality. 



CHILDREN'S EXPERIENCES 83 

A SCHOOLROOM STUDY OF CHILDREN'S READING 

A sort of study directly useful for schoolroom pur- 
poses was made by Miss Minnie E. Porter at Emporia, 
Kansas. 9 This concerned the reading choices of pupils 
in seventh and eighth grades. Miss Porter encouraged 
children to bring to class whatever books they were 
reading and liked — any books at all. They were startled 
by this catholicity, but took the teacher at her word, 
and the things they brought were a genuine revelation. 
They spent a class period — a sort of " supervised study 
lesson " — in reading these at their seats, and opportunity 
was given the teacher for free individual conferences on 
the books and what the readers liked about them. An 
opening was thus effected for discovering their actual 
criteria of choice and for suggesting substitutions of better 
matter having a like appeal. It is an excellent thing to 
open a discussion of these standards by permitting oral 
report on favorite books. There should be the least pos- 
sible censoring of titles by the teacher, but he will learn 
beforehand what will be reported on. Discussion thus 
aroused of what is satisfying in each story, with illustrative 
samples and incidents, brings up clearly the considerations 
which govern and the specific things that attract children 
in selecting books. 10 Really good work in placing 
literature effectively before children can be done only in 
the light of what children do in fact like best and what 
it is specifically that appeals to them in their favorite books. 

THE DANGERS OF CHILDREN'S UNGUIDED READING 

It cannot be too strongly urged that much of the 
material children choose and absorb is distinctly per- 
nicious. Oftenest it presents the worst sort of raw ad- 

9 Minnie E. Porter : "Reading and Literature," Ch. XX of Report 
of a Survey of the Public Schools of Leavenworth, Kansas, Kansas 
State Normal School, Emporia, 191 5. 

10 See Chapter IX, pp ; 262 ff . • • 



84 READING AND LITERATURE 

venture, in which stupendous dangers threaten wide- 
gesturing and bombastic heroes, and are turned aside 
through the blindest chance. The heroes do absurdly 
impossible things without effort or weariness. And they 
are personally indistinguishable from, one another, without 
even common wit or real courage. It is unfortunate that 
such braggart impossibilities seem admirable and serve as 
patterns to aspiring boys. 

The usual stories of schools and sports, too, are in the 
great mass untrue and unwholesome. One book, by a 
writer for boys who has been praised for his "healthy 
tone " — the second in popularity with boys, according to 
Dr. Jordan — records how a college oarsman aided dis- 
affection in the crew — he was, of course, always right and 
the crew captain always wrong — bolted, on an inconse- 
quent impulse, on a steamer for some revolutionary 
quarter of the world, and, after absurd and purgative 
adventures and hardships upon various oceans, returned to 
row triumphantly in the final race. That such bad sports- 
manship and foolish impossibility is tolerated in boys' 
books is most unfortunate. Even worse nonsense is pre- 
sented in various strings of incredibilities called "The 
Boy Allies " and the " Boy Vigilantes." 

If you would contrast this sort of thing with tales of 
stirring, romantic adventure that have the mark of reality 
and possibility and that are peopled by live men and boys, 
read Herman Melville's Typee, a true account of extraor- 
dinary hardships in escaping from a whaling vessel and 
of captivity among Marquesan cannibals. Or taste the 
full flavor of swift, vivid battle and escape and terrified 
hiding in Stevenson's Kidna-pped, or the fine scenes of 
pioneering and perilous escapes and ups and downs of 
fortune, studied and made really alive from the records of 
the Forty-niners, in Mr. Stewart Edward White's Gold. 

The emotions presented in many juvenile books— 



CHILDREN'S EXPERIENCES 85 

especially, of course, books for girls — are conventional 
and sickly and overdrawn. Girls like, particularly, stories 
wherein alternate 'pages are drenched with tears. They 
revel in the misunderstood and morbid heroine of the 
" Elsie Books/' and in impossible unrestraints of feeling. 
The usual love story is beyond question pernicious 
throughout. Some of its actual types and effects are noted 
in the following chapter. We cannot afford to sanction 
any treatment of fundamental matters save by those with 
wisdom and power enough to give us wholesome, true 
pictures of what is fine and desirable in human relationships. 
That silly and unprincipled persons are suffered to carry 
blazing matches into the powder magazines of young 
people's emotions, as in the abominable novels of Mr. 
Chambers and Myrtle Reed, and in the common assault 
on children's attention in moving pictures and in such 
books as the "Motor Girls" series, constitutes a most 
serious menace. 

So with the usual " boarding school " tales for both 
boys and girls. The sole motive running through most of 
these performances is clandestine defiance and hilarious 
practical jokes at the expense of authorities, who are 
always stupid and arrogant. Kipling's Stalky and Co., 
clever as it is, must be cited as a case in point. The boys 
are lazy and unscrupulous and the masters and the rector 
altogether contemptible. The real achievements of these 
boys in life afterward simply complete a discrediting — 
possibly deserved — of the private school system described. 
There is matter here,, certainly, for educational authorities 
and parents to consider, but hardly, it seems to me, suitable 
food for boys. If a system of discipline or education is 
so bad that defiance of it is the main piece of creditable 
achievement for boys or girls, we had better attack it in 
some other fashion than by glorifying the rebels in books 
for children. 



86 READING AND LITERATURE 

The sort of nonsense that is actually recommended to 
children and apparently read by them is well illustrated by 
some recent advertisements; several of them are issued 
by a Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. It 
is sad that children's intelligence should be so insulted, and 
that many children are so ill provided with anything 
better to read as to like such books. This reveals both 
reasons for and effects of the state of adult literature which 
we have considered in Chapter II. The first sample is an 
apparently commendatory account in a recent newspaper 
book-review : 

" Story in which a group of small children go on a 
hunt for buried treasure and then organize a crusade 
[sic] that results in search for the north pole." 

" Tells how a terrible conspiracy is discovered by 
three boys, who crush it at the risk of their lives." 

The lengths to which good people will go to inculcate 
moral ideas, quite irrespective of truth, are likewise 
shown. Tales that " emphasize throughout our ingrati- 
tude in forgetting the sacrifices made for us by our 
friends " or are " designed to show that we rise or fall by 
following or neglecting the impulse to conquer self and 
serve others," or those that " illustrate the rule of 
Providence in the world " have usually little time or atten- 
tion to give to the presentation of true and actual, normal 
and wholesome human experience. They are simply an- 
other form of the novel with a purpose, 11 which is so occu- 
pied in proving an ethical or economic thesis that it has 
no eye for the reality of life. 

WHERE WE MUST BEGIN 

We have gone at some length into the stupidities and 
dangers of a great part of the literature that children 
actually choose and read ; it is quite clear that there is an 

n See Chapter I, pp. 36 ff. 



CHILDREN'S EXPERIENCES 87 

altogether necessary office for the teaching of literature : in 
getting children away from preoccupation with this sort 
of thing to comprehension and realization of excellent 
literature that presents life in some measure steadily 
and honestly. 

But if these books we have considered are distinctly 
harmful, why should we thus connive at introducing 
them, even temporarily, into our schoolrooms? This is 
indeed counselling dangerous practices and demanding of 
the teacher a wisdom and tact perhaps unneeded under 
the single system of inculcating undisputed classics from 
reading books and expurgated editions. Nor should we 
by any means overlook the main issue of the campaign 
— the supplanting of the noxious stuffs by really whole- 
some and fine matter. It is just here, often, that teachers 
fail; having discovered the level of the class, they com- 
fortably climb down to it and rest content with their 
pupils' copious and enthusiastic but undirected reading. 
This is of course mere surrender. But I insist that until 
we know everything we can about the conditions of chil- 
dren's actual taste and powers of comprehension, we can- 
not hope to work effectively at raising their standards. 
We must work in the dark, placidly accepting their mean- 
ingless statements of appreciation of the masterpieces they 
read in class but are unable to realize and understand. We 
must first know the precise nature of the forces arrayed 
against us. 

iXt is in a measure true that the worst books lose their 
attractiveness so soon as they are read openly and not in 
furtive and defiant concealment. And, what is more to 
the point, they rapidly fade into insignificance when the 
joy of fine literary adventure is made possible to children 
in excellent books that are really within their range of 
experience. The accounts of their boyhood reading by 
most men who are connoisseurs and artists of good litera- 



88 READING AND LITERATURE 

ture are curious conglomerations of excellent and horribly 
cheap. There is, for example, Stevenson's joy in " Penny 
Plain and Twopence Colored" dramas and his almost 
agonized experience of Macbeth, 12 and, equally in point, a 
list by Mr. Stephen Leacock in a recent Times Book 
Review, ranging from Dickens and Mark Twain through 
Jules Verne to " the half -dime novels " staged " on the 
prairie," that "always opened with 'Bang! Bang! Bang! ' " 
But nobody is here urged to sit idly by and wait for 
good literature to drive out bad. The chief purpose of 
such studies as have been proposed, of children's reading 
choices and of what they like in stories, >is to give us a 
starting place for definite guidance of reading. Once we 
know the sort of thing that actually appeals, we can dis- 
cover to our pupils, books with related interest, but with 
real fineness of material and of presentation. Once we 
know the criteria that guide children's choices, we can 
apply them intelligently in directing children to things ex- 
cellent and beautiful that they can understand and enjoy. 
As we shall presently discover, this material will be as 
often classic as current literature. 

D. THE BASES OF THESE INTERESTS IN ORIGINAL NATURE 

In the remainder of this chapter we shall discuss the 
basic types of literary enjoyment and the instinctive desires 
and interests of children which are most definitely met 
and satisfied by adventures in books. 

Why children like live reading matter and "what they 
like about it need engage us in no lengthy discussion. 
They like good stories for the same reason that we do, be- 
cause the stories help them in a sort of " inner drama- 
tizing "of action such as goes on all the time in our mem- 
ory and fancy. 13 The story teller or writer has definite and 

"Cruse: Robert Louis Stevenson (Stokes, 191 5), Chapter II. 
"J. B. Kerfoot: How to Read, Chapter II. 



CHILDREN'S EXPERIENCES 89 

more or less new experiences for them to live among; he 
directs them by suggestions of bits of their former ex- 
perience more or less recombined in new patterns. Like 
reminiscences of the old red schoolhouse or the gossip of 
class reunions the tale may simply suggest memories of 
what readers have again and again experienced, with 
little additions and revisions here and there. This is the 
pleasure of the most realistic literature — the pleasure old 
Londoners, for example, find in Pendennis. Discovering 
everyday and familiar sensations suggested to memory is 
like the pleasant repetition of any satisfying experience. 
The child of two or three years likes the most minute 
description of his breakfast and other ordinary daily em- 
ployments. Using this sort of matter is, indeed, the quick- 
est route to making him at home in stories and story-telling. 
But gradually he comes to enjoy the introduction of 
comical or surprising details into the midst of this every- 
day : bears, for instance, which he has seen in pictures or 
at the zoo, eating out of his porringer or living in rooms 
like his own. But his fairies must have moth or butter- 
fly wings such as he is familiar with, his trolls " eyes as 
large as saucers, and a nose as long as a poker. ,, For, as 
we have seen, there is no other way to introduce any new 
thing into anybody's imagining than by this regrouping 
of details already on hand. By that simple formula is cre- 
ated the whole range of romances — accounts of voyages to 
the moon, or bloody sessions on a pirate ship, or grisly 
hours with ghost or wizard. The same recombining of 
familiar elements makes up, too, the entire process of im- 
agining scenes of the distant past and the other side of the 
world — the practical but happy employments of real 
history and geography. This help in effecting the, utmost 
possible departures from everyday life, presenting ad- 
ventures larger, more horrific, more beautiful and brave 



9 o READING AND LITERATURE 

than we can have ourselves in humdrum fact, makes up 
the keen zest of romance. 

These complementary interests, in pleasant familiar 
happenings and in the remote and strange, are perhaps 
forms of what psychologists have called the instincts of 
" domesticity and migration," liking of home comfort and 
"Wanderlust." But both enjoyment of the well-known 
and comfortable preference for whatever is beyond our 
present tether-rope and the direct range of our five or seven 
senses are merely forms of that "love of sensory life for its 
own sake" which Dr. Thorndike describes. One of the 
deepest seated instincts is "a love for sudden changes 
and sharp contrasts ;" it is far stronger in children, in boys 
especially, than in any but the most recklessly adventurous 
adult. There is, too, a most significant variant on this — 
an intense pleasure in exercising our imaginations so as 
to have something happen inside us as a consequence of 
our calling up past sensations. We are by original instinct 
inordinately fond of " doing something and having some- 
thing happen as a consequence " — of what Groos calls 
the " pleasure of being a cause;" and this applies not only 
to physical things which " tumble when I hit them and 
toot when I blow," but to mental activities as well — 
" making an ideal plan and thereby getting a conclusion, 
making an imaginary person and thereby getting further 
imaginations of how he would act." Indeed, "it is as 
instinctive and ' natural ' for certain men to enjoy the 
unforced exercise of thought and skill as to enjoy food, 
sleep, companionship, approval or conquest." u But most 
of us need all the help we can get from more keenly im- 
aginative persons in telling ourselves stories and as- 
sembling data toward conclusions. We follow gladly the 
author who has something to say. And whoever has ob- 

M E, L. Thorndike : Educational Psychology, 1 : 141 -3. 



CHILDREN'S EXPERIENCES 91 

served the keen joy of almost all normal children in 
reading favorite stories is willing to concede that this 
particular " exercise of thought and skill " is as enjoyable 
to practically all normal persons, and not to certain ones 
only, as almost any other instinctive activity. 

In the following pages are reviewed various types of 
deepest-seated instinctive or original satisfactions to which 
the reading of literature contributes, when it is a real ex- 
perience and not mere going over words. For all the 
material of this section, as for much else here presented, 
I have drawn freely upon Dr. Thorndike's Educational 
Psychology and tried simply to apply my understanding 
of his chapters on " Original Nature " to the subject we 
are discussing. Whatever is said here must be read with 
all that author's qualifications as to the incomplete and 
unsatisfactory state of scientific knowledge on this subject 
and with the reservations he makes. 15 Whoever wants 
more than a brief and unsatisfactory glance at this most 
interesting field is particularly urged to read the chapters 
themselves. A fair understanding of the complex topic 
can not be had as well in any other way. 

THE PLEASURES OF DANGER, TERROR, AND ACHIEVEMENT 
AGAINST ODDS 

One of a child's earliest and most curious joys is the 
fascination of fearful things — ogres and dragons and the 
like perils. 16 A modicum of terror with its sure escape 

"Op. cit. pp. 39 ff., etc. 

" Of course these must not be too realizably loathly, or more fear- 
ful than his sensitiveness can endure. The shiver and agony of dread 
is generally relieved by a sense of the pleasant illusion of the story, 
and always the satis fyingness is increased by safe return to familiar 
objects and comforting arms at the story's end. Warning against 
unwisely carrying this sort of tale too far should be hardly necessary. 
But we cannot know individual children too well in this respect. 
Often the most stoical suffer most, and Charles Lamb's confession in 
" Witches and Other Night Fears " in Essays of Elia is only one 
voice out of much real but unexpressed suffering. 



92 READING AND LITERATURE 

is excellent fun, always right when the child has his grip 
on the safe shore of actuality, as the school child can be 
helped to keep it without at all spoiling his illusion. 

A keener zest is usually found in the defiance of ogre 
and goblin terrors — especially, perhaps, when one is a 
little cowardly in real perils — and in their successful 
mastery through all sorts of dangers and privations. The 
pleasures of " angry and pugnacious behavior " and of 
" hunting," deep and very strong in boys and, I believe, 
in girls as well, lead them to exult in picturing the hero 
who refuses to take odds, but rather enjoys having them 
against him. Here, of course, the child is usually himself 
the hero of the tale — no matter how little resemblance is 
superficially visible — and always right and just. But he 
has also the fun of seeing himself doing deeds of prowess, 
and of feeling only shadowily the pain and privation. In 
such achievement one takes part most joyously as a story 
hero ; there is no rude jolt of incongruity from the attitude 
of parents and other unappreciative persons. But we have 
already noted that cheap and abominable sorts of achieve- 
ment are oftenest selected for admiration by chil- 
dren's inexperience. 

The instinct of achievement has some relation to the 
delight of (i) clutching and carrying off what anyone 
else has and (2) collecting and hoarding all sorts of 
absurdly useless things, like the Deacon's effects described 
by Thoreau — " for his life had not been ineffectual." 1T 
But pleasure in ownership apart from these specific cases 
is believed by Dr. Thorndike to have very doubtful claim 
to basis in original nature ; it appears to be " the out- 
growth of training cooperating with one or both of these 
tendencies." 18 The pleasure of literature most closely 
related to these is acquiring fairy gold or sunken treasures 

17 Thoreau : Walden, Chapter I. 

18 Educational Psychology, vol. i, pp. 53 ff. ; 102. 



CHILDREN'S EXPERIENCES 93 

or rich domains east of the sun. But the pleasure here is 
mainly a pure and greedless one, in simply the contempla- 
tion of heaped stuffs and jewels. It is quite consistent 
with impulsively generous sharing, and one is not 
seriously pained by the escape of John Silver the pirate 
with a huge share of the booty in the last chapter. The 
pleasant experiences of literature are mainly unselfish and 
grow the better for sharing. 

INSTINCTS OF ATTENTION-GETTING 

The pleasure of achievement is closely related to that 
in strutting, mastering and " showing off." The enjoy- 
ment of merely associating with other human beings, real 
enough to be sure, is apparently mild and ineffectual com- 
pared with the deep-seated desire to assert oneself, to take 
center stage. The sort of rivalry and combat that Mark 
Twain pictures when Tom Sawyer met the " new boy " is 
a stock piece of the literary trade. It is a large part of 
the joy we feel in tourneys " where knights smite and are 
smitten," and in the triumph of Ali Baba over his richer 
brother. Here too we identify ourselves with the hero 
and feel something of his power of strife and zest 
of mastery. 

This same instinct appears in girls oftenest as a keen 
and zealous interest in styles and colors of dress that are 
notably in the mode ; at any rate, so the girls' stories and 
novels represent the matter. This is a means of assert- 
ing oneself rather before other girls and women, who 
notice such details, than before men. Dr. Jordan 19 notes 
that Miss Alcott's and other stories picture bitter suffering 
as caused by the necessity to wear patched or dingy clothes 
among others who are better dressed. That all these 
types of feeling and action in both boys and girls arise 
from a deep-seated instinct of attention-getting seems clear. 

18 A. M. Jordan : Children's Interests in Reading. 



_ 4 



94 READING AND LITERATURE 

THE PLEASURE OF SUBMISSION HERO WORSHIP 

But there is another satisfying attitude in relation to 
the story hero that has not, perhaps, been so commonly 
recognized : That is the pleasure taken in acknowledging 
the superior fineness and grandness of another person, in 
swearing ourselves his loyal henchmen, and gladly giving 
over insistence on ourselves and our jealous instincts of 
rivalry. I know of no force so excellent in its effect on the 
average strident youngster as this hero-worship. We 
have all of us felt it sometime, in wonder at the defiance of 
Tell or at the supernal power of Jeanne d'Arc inspired by 
her visions or at the sacrifice of the best youth of the world 
to an ideal of freedom. Such enthusiasms are of course 
of the less account if they do not lead us to " do something 
about it," to follow the noble example at our distance. 
But there may be good simply in the gesture of putting 
off for a time our blatant self-assertions and reverencing 
a finer character and its compelling ideal. It needs noting 
once more, however, that admiration is quite as sure to be 
given instinctively to wrong and dangerous qualiti2s — 
particularly, of course, to " gorgeous display " and other 
conspicuous and valueless or harmful exhibitions of 
power, as to excellence. What men or mobs are unable to 
appreciate and honor, as in Browning's The Patriot and 
in Hawthorne's Great Stone Face, it is the peculiar gift of 
literature to discover and present worthily for their rev- 
erence, even though such true assessment is generally a 
good deal after the fact. 

PITYING, SCORNING, AND TORMENTING 

" Frowns, hoots, and sneers seem bound as original 
responses to the observation of empty-handedness, physi- 
cal meanness, pusillanimity, and defect." 20 This naturally 

■* E. L. Thorndike : Educational Psychology, I : p. 90. 



CHILDREN'S EXPERIENCES 95 

takes itself out in playground and street bullying of the 
worst sort. Tormenting the village " queery " is a 
barbaric survival that apparently influences to more 
vicious small-boy and girl conduct than most other 
observable instincts. Similarly, " frightened, pained be- 
havior V makes us uncomfortable and often provokes acts 
of relief. But here again the results are as often irrational 
and even harmful as actually good. " The commonest 
bodily conditions due to pity, as reported by Saunders 
and Hall, are loss of appetite and inability to sleep. The 
irrational impulse to get the sick to eat seems to prevail 
the world over." " We pity, not the gifted youth debarred 
from education, but the beggar's bloody sore; we are less 
excited by a great injustice than by a little blood." 21 

Children — and especially girls — like to read about 
downtrodden and suffering creatures, no matter how 
fiberless and vicious, and pour out upon them floods of 
useless pity, enervating to the pourer. A mothering of 
literary as well as real waifs and stray mangy curs is ex- 
tremely common. That this beautiful spirit may in 
indiscriminate lavishing become thoroughly harmful is 
sufficiently apparent. I have known literature teachers to 
expatiate on the sweetness and piteousness of the character 
of Rosamund the king's mistress in Becket. We must 
recognize and study all appeals to instinctive pity in litera- 
ture^ — particularly, I think, in stories for girls — to find 
out whether this force of human feeling is being rightly 
or harmfully directed and to shunt it into sensible and 
useful channels. 

These instincts of pitying and mothering lie in the very 
basis of original nature, probably deeper than learned ideas 
or beliefs can go. And they contain in themselves almost 
the sole possibility for a development of civilized, sympa- 

21 Op. cit. pp. 81 ff., 102-3 ; 281 : Briefer Course, pp. 27 ff., 38, 
123 ff. 



96 READING AND LITERATURE 

thetic understanding among human beings, of coopera- 
tion, and of intelligent mutual aid. Out of this rather soft 
sentimentalism alone can grow wisely and rightly based 
comradeship and helpful interrelations of men and women. 
On the other hand, these instincts have been commonly 
misdirected by sentimental philanthropists, who have suc- 
ceeded in encouraging weak good will in place of hatred 
of unsocial and evil behavior, like wholesale theft of priv- 
ilege and evasion of obligation. In large degree senti- 
mental pity in reaction against the cruel irrationality of 
debtors' prisons is responsible for our easily abused bank- 
ruptcy laws. " The doctrine of hate must be preached as 
the counteraction of the doctrine of love when that pules 
and whines." 22 The turning of the hunting instincts 
toward hating fiercely and hunting out pernicious practices 
exhibits the right and proper direction of these elemental 
forces. The part of true, undistorted pictures of cause and 
effect for bringing about such redirection we shall have 
opportunity to consider later in some detail. 

PREDOMINANT ENJOYMENTS AT VARIOUS AGES 

Little children in the elementary grades rather sharply 
grow away from pleasure in familiar and realistic stories 
to a keen appreciation of anything surprising and dif- 
ferent. Improbability does not now disturb them at all, 
because things the most commonplace to us — railroads 
and telephones and gas stoves — are quite as mysterious to 
them as goblins and enchantments. All alike are to be 
taken as they appear, because anything at all may occur 
in this most remarkable existence ; and yet each is worth 
marvelling at for a while. And of course these things that 
we call commonplace are actually as wonderful as "the 
starry heavens above and the moral law within." This 

*R. W. Emerson: Self Reliance. 



CHILDREN'S EXPERIENCES 97 

wonder is the child's most precious possession in the 
meeting of new experiences. The man who, like Steven- 
son, has " never been bored in his life," but has gone about 
it with all the delightful wonder of the country boy gazing 
into shop windows, is capable of the heartiest enjoyment 
of vivid experience. He is the poetic person who is inter- 
ested in crossing the ferry, not simply in getting across. 23 

In particular this pleasant wonder is the small child's 
principal literary equipment. The persons in the story 
interest him little or not at all, and may be merely carica- 
tures or stock characters. He knows only a few people, 
and they — he himself particularly — fit naturally into the 
few roles in whatever tale. This one is mighty and always 
good, like oneself or one's father or older brother; that 
one a vile ruffian — some bullying acquaintance; and here 
is a beautiful princess — any doll or pretty child or wor- 
shipped mother or aunt will suit that part. 

Children between nine or ten and fifteen years old — » 
say in grades four through nine — grow rapidly in power 
of reading longer stories and following more complex 
plots. But the most significant change in their attitude 
is a steadily increasing demand, showing itself, to be sure, 
at widely differing ages, for greater and greater measure 
of truth to experience as they know it. In the junior 
high-school or intermediate-school years particularly they 
are apt to cast aside as silly and babyish the delightful 
inconsequence of fairy stories and of Alice's Wonder- 
land, and the crudities of folk tales and ballads. In the 
boys' interest in thrilling adventure and effusion of blood 
this gradually takes the form of refusing to credit the 
most inconceivable deeds and wholly chance-ordained 
heroisms. There is generally present in girls — very vigor- 
ous in many of them — a lusting after bloody and violent 

23 Max Eastman ; The Enjoyment of Poetry, Chapter 1. 

7 



98 READING AND LITERATURE 

adventures which makes them keenly like the slaughter of 
the suitors in Odysseus' hall. But the meaning of diffi- 
culty begins to be more truly realized by children in these 
years, and its mastery by stoical and indomitable courage 
and resource is prized. With all young people now 
comes the high tide of hero-worship; the worthy heroes 
and the fine, shadowy, and mystical ideals in the knightly 
epics furnish them most excellent food. They do not 
understand what the quest of the grail or of New Worlds 
precisely meant to the men who set out, but they have as 
real a faith. 

Girls are apt now to turn back to the simple and 
humorous stories of home and school such as they have 
largely abandoned for a time in favor of fairy lore. These 
familiar stories must have their element of adventure, too, 
and small delicious perils — for the most part, unfortu- 
nately, conflicts with authorities and sly shifts to 
prevail against them, or rather rude and obvious jokes at 
their expense. 

Most unfortunately, too, the idealism of this time is too 
likely to take the form of an unripe " love interest," and 
to seek its pasturage on quite abominable stuff. Our main 
reliance here is upon finding enough other and finer inter- 
ests which may crowd this out. Books of travel and of 
art, music and dancing, adventures in handicrafts and in 
magic, healthy outdoor books of campmg and exploration 
— whatever can build up " habits of harmless enjoy- 
ment " 24 must be called on freely here : for bareness of real 
activities and true interests helps loose the reins of control. 

Not probably until the senior high-school age is any 
genuine interest in individualities and character likely to 
develop. This comes, naturally, with a ridiculous naivete 

"S. C. Parker: Methods of Teaching in High Schools (Ginn, 
1915), Chapter X. 



CHILDREN'S EXPERIENCES 99 

and seriousness like that of Amy Grey and her loved 
Ginevra 25 or of the sober-souled hero of Mr. Phillpotts' 
From the Angle of Seventeen. The boy and girl of these 
ages are utterly without competent data for judging the 
people they meet. They like or dislike on purely sur- 
face evidence, and impute motives and misread char- 
acter most damagingly. But they are sublimely con- 
fident in their own wide knowledge of life and in their 
keen intuitions. A really developed interest in character as 
portrayed truly in literature — in Maggie Tulliver and 
Richard Feverel, when individual children are old enough 
to appreciate such poignant joys and sorrows — is one of 
the chief contributions that the good teaching of literature 
can make in these years, and the difficulty of advising and 
guiding and of teaching how to read these books should be 
a high challenge to a teacher's willingness of endeavor and 
to his tact and artistry. 

It has been suggested in this chapter that a first duty 
of the teacher of literature is to learn everything possible 
about real living children, and in particular about their 
actual choices in reading. Various studies and books are 
helpful in the light they can throw on this problem; the 
best recourse is certain to be really living with the children 
themselves, observing and sharing their activities, and 
discovering their ideals and preferences. In particular, 
until we know what they read when they are unrestricted 
in their choice, and carefully deduce their standards of ex- 
cellence, we are not in the best position to help them to 
more intelligent application of these standards and to 
evolving better ones. We need to know, ourselves, the 
books that they read, to discover their possibilities of harm 
and of good. And this we cannot gauge safely until we 
have thoroughly tested our own criteria of literary ex- 

25 In James Barrie's Alice Sit-by-the-Fire. 



ioo READING AND LITERATURE 

cellence and made sure of the wholesomeness of our own 
taste. Then, having really assessed the quality of chil- 
dren's reading interests, and knowing definitely the sort 
of books we want them to enjoy and understand, we can 
go forward with somewhat reasonable sureness in the way 
of imbuing them with that literature which they should 
have for their heritage. 30 



30 A most important book for everyteacher who wishes to analyze 
the aims and results of current education, and to know some of the 
unsuspected things that go on in his own and other people's minds, is 
J. H. Robinson's The Mind in the Making (Harper, 1921). The 
author's analysis of rationalisation — the process of finding " good 
reasons " for believing as we already do — and of the contributions of 
stone-age minds to our current thinking are highly enlightening. 



CHAPTER IV 

TYPES OF EXCELLENT LITERATURE WITHIN 
CHILDREN'S INTERESTS 

Given a knowledge of what really is literature, and of 
what actual living children are like and what they enjoy, 
a teacher is prepared to assist his pupils in choosing what 
is worthy and at the same time comprehensible and actual 
experience to them. It is clearly necessary that we hold 
quite as high standards of concrete living presentation, of 
truth to human experience, and of significance in in- 
terpretation for children's reading as for our own. Of 
course no one should suppose that the realms of nonsense 
and of high romance and fairy lore are closed by so 
sweeping an edict ; and yet such absurdity is occasionally 
met, in schoolrooms as well as outside them. One of our 
duties, nevertheless, is to make conscious children's dawn- 
ing realization that these pleasant and irresponsible regions 
are not presented as purlieus of reality. 1 We need partic- 
ularly to guide them to literature that helps them tighten 
their hold on reality and increase their sense of genuine 
human experience. It is therefore needful to make sure 
that the adventures children admire and credit in books 
are not distorted from reality either by sentimentalism, or 
by unworthy, exaggerated appeal to their love of incredible 
romance, or by selection with moralizing purpose which 
destroys essential truth and reality. 

1 See pp. 1 08 ft. below. 



ici 



io2 READING AND LITERATURE 

A. GENUINE LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN 

I. THE GROWTH OF CHILDREN'S DEMANDS UPON 
LITERATURE 

We need, then, to examine carefully the literature we 
decide upon as suitable for young people. It is not enough 
that it be classic, or highly acclaimed, or widely recom- 
mended in reading lists for schools. We are personally 
responsible for seeing that it is both true and worth while. 
Much that is given to children both in homes and in school 
courses, as we examine it by these criteria, is found 
seriously wanting. 

Indeed, in choosing literature for children it is wise and 
necessary to include only such matter as is within pos- 
sible reach of children's imaginations, which must of 
course build with materials of their actual previous ex- 
perience. It should also, of course, appeal to their im- 
mediate interests. Such philosophies of life, in essays or 
poems, as we desire them to have for their use in maturer 
years are meaningless and uninteresting to them. 
Emerson's Each and All is persistently taught in eighth 
grades to youngsters whose real perceptions and interests 
are with Henty heroes or the Little Colonel. So is Thano- 
topsis, or parts of the Faery Queen. Here, as in the 
practice of laying down in their memories gems of excel- 
lent thought which they are expected to understand and 
use later, we have peculiarly vicious forms of the "storage 
theory" of education. To a child who is so specially sensi- 
tive as to get something of their meaning, too, the poig- 
nant sorrow of common grade-school selections like Little 
Boy Blue and Lowell's The First Snowfall is sometimes a 
harrowing grief. A sharp illustration of the morbidity 
of such experiences is given in Mr. Hudson's chapter 
" The Death of an Old Dog," 2 in his autobiography. 

a W. H. Hudson : Far Azvay and Long Ago. 



EXCELLENT LITERATURE 103 

GOOD LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN'S BOOKSHELVES 

If we only give them access to excellent books within 
reach of their present experience — it need not be within 
immediate easy grasp, but they must be able to get it by 
stretching their imaginations smartly — we have done what 
is first and best in the teaching of literature. The wide 
ranges of literature for various grade groups are merely 
glanced at in the bibliographies appended. 3 Other lists 
there referred to can be used to extend the field indefinitely. 
Those given in this study are narrowly limited. For I 
have not put into them any book, no matter how repeatedly 
cited in other places, which I have not examined myself 
or had trustworthy testimony upon, in most cases from 
both grown people and children who have read it. The lists 
are intended for classroom and school libraries. I feel that 
for these purposes an even more strict application of 
standards is needed than public library or Scout list- 
makers can afford to adopt. School courses in English, 
in particular, should help to raissf the level of children's 
actual out-of-school reading to more discriminating stand- 
ards. We need, as the artist in Mr. Dell's book ex- 
presses it, to " help them grow up " without losing their 
childlikeness. 4 And just in the difficulties here suggested 
1 — in children's never growing up at all, in literary as in 
other experience, or in their losing all spontaneous enjoy- 
ment of literature and of art — rest most failures in teach- 
ing our subject. I have tried to furnish liberally the 
materials of real joyous experience and hearty adventure 
of all kinds in thoroughly worth-while presentations. If 
these are read aright — so as to become real experiences — 
there is little danger of a permanent taste for the poor 
stuff that children cannot avoid finding all about them. 

3 Pp. 369, ff. 

4 Floyd Dell: Were You Ever a Child? Ch. XVI— a valuable dis- 
cussion throughout. 



io4 READING AND LITERATURE 

I have in general omitted so-called "stepping stones" 
books — mostly third-rate ones — designed to bridge from 
where children are to worthy literature. These can be 
found in any quantity in the library lists cited ; 5 but it is 
peculiarly necessary with books of poorer quality that the 
teacher himself know and test them before he suggests 
them to his pupils, so that he can recommend them consci- 
entiously if he feels it necessary and make the proper 
connections with children's actual tastes. Wherever pos- 
sible it seems better to go further down in the grade lists 
for books that will appeal, rather than into regions where 
our recommendations can be at best half-hearted. In any 
case — whether in recognized lists or outside them, it can- 
not be too strongly urged that one recommend only what 
he knows himself, so that he can relate his counsel 
intelligently to the interest; of the individual child. 
This is particularly important because one's suggestion 
may be the beginning, or the end, of excellent reading by 
many a child who has not tried any before. Only by 
beginning in knowledge at first hand of the books that 
children actually are reading and of those that present the 
best of similar appeal to them is the teacher likely to gain 
real influence. 

PUBLIC LIBRARY AND SCOUT LISTS 

Public libraries which are well organized for work with 
children have made a commendable effort to keep rid of 
bad material and to help children find what is wholesome 
and excellent. And though, doubtless inevitably, many of 
them still contain a good deal that is hardly to be excused, 
at least the really pernicious is generally absent from the 
juvenile room. Whoever has observed the recent ex- 
hibits of beautiful Christmas books in the great libraries, 
and doubtless in many small ones, realizes what increase of 

6 Appendix II, p. 371, ff. 



EXCELLENT LITERATURE 105 

knowledge about excellent children's literature was here 
possible for the teacher who would avail himself of it, as 
well as for parents. 

Another contribution to solving our problem has been 
made by the chief librarian of the Boy Scouts of America, 
Mr. Franklin K. Mathiews. His list of books for boys 
rightly makes wholesomeness — good sportsmanship, for 
example, and other decencies of social relations — rather 
than literary quality, its major criterion of choice. On 
this count the books in the list, so far as I know them per- 
sonally, are carefully chosen. They begin unquestionably 
at the right end, the boy himself. Certainly the list con- 
tains a high proportion of wholesome and enjoyable ma- 
terial. 6 But so far as I can judge from the boys that I 
have known and worked with, it seems to me that a higher 
standard might have been held in presenting more real 
and high heroism and less imaginative and hardly credible 
adventure. Boys of the scout ages, I have found, are actu- 
ally as enthralled by the genuine adventures of Dr. 
Grenfell and James Norman Hall, and by the heroic life 
and death of Captain Scott and of Chinese Gordon, as by 
the false thrills of impossible "boy allies" and "boy 
explorers." 7 Why has it been thought necessary to put 
boys into story situations of war and exploration and 
hunting and to make them the heroes of such adventure, 
in place of telling equally well the deeds of true heroes? 
We have, to be sure, the example of Stevenson in Treasure 
Island; but Stevenson invests the romance and the boy 
with a reality not possible to the usual adventure writer. 
Most authors would, I take it, succeed better if they wrote 
about situations that they could get real detail into — either 

Books for Boy Scouts. Library Commission, Boy Scouts of 
America, 200 Fifth Avenue, New York City. 

T It should be explained that many books with the name "Boy 
Scouts of So-and-So" are published without any authorization from 
the Scouts. 



io6 READING AND LITERATURE 

about natural boy adventures like those of Huck and Tom 
and Penrod, or about genuine, conceivable heroisms. 

Nevertheless the Boy Scout list, and in various 
measure the lists published by children's libraries noted 
in the appendix, have been a most helpful contribution to 
our problem. Not that we can afford to restrict ourselves 
to what they present, nor to accept any of it without our 
own checking of results by reading and by getting reac- 
tions from children's reading; but they furnish excellent 
suggestions as to young people's real preferences, of 
which, too often, school lists have been barren, 

LITERATURE FOR THE PRIMARY GRADES 

We have observed that the child's literary enjoyments 
in the years when he is entering school, and before he is 
ten or so years old, are chiefly a full and joyous crediting 
of every sort of wonder. Then the folk tales and fairy 
tales and myths are most eagerly heard or read. Recent 
years have brought us great store of folk literature from 
all countries — Japan and South Africa, Russia and the 
Punjab and Brazil — to the great happiness of children and 
their growth in fancy. From these stories to the god- 
protected heroes of myths and the changelings of ballads 
is a far cry for adult analysis, but all is of the same piece, 
and rightly, for children. Fairies have been reverenced 
and feared, almost as have the ancient gods. 

Modern literature contains good things for the little 
child's collection mainly in proportion as it succeeds, not 
in writing patronizingly down to his level, but in having, 
and not imitating, the childlikeness of folk literature. One 
can count on a very few fingers the writers who have done 
this highly difficult thing: Joel Chandler Harris and 
Kipling, certainly, and Hans Andersen, where he is not 
keeping one eye on the grown people, have written tales 
of genuinely folk-quality. Such literature of real 



EXCELLENT LITERATURE 107 

whimsy and absurdity as, first of all, Thackeray's The 
Rose and the Ring, and the stories of Lewis Carroll, Frank 
R. Stockton, and recently Mr. E. P. Benson, is a modern 
art closely akin to this childlikeness of folk literature. Of 
truly appealing verse for children there is naturally as 
scant a supply, and some of it comes from writers whose 
usual appeal is in studies of children for the pleasure of 
their elders; only a small selection of the verses of Steven- 
son, Riley, Field, and some beautifully artistic fragments 
from Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, and William 
Blake are certainly to be named beside the fine old de- 
lights of Mother Goose. The unsuitable poems not for 
but about children are as numerous as the similar stories : 
Whittier's Barefoot Boy, for example. 

The really literary retellings of folk tales, which are 
fitted to children's comprehension but retain the quality 
of the originals, are scarcely more numerous. For most 
tales which in their real form are beyond the primary 
child's power, we should in general prefer selections which 
adapt, but make the least possible change in the details 
and wording of the stories as we have them in their 
sources. Our care in choosing should be chiefly in getting 
versions that do not sentimentalize and moralize and other- 
wise falsify the stories. To present the Titans of Greek 
mythology as little children in a sort of paper-flower 
paradise, as Hawthorne and Mr. Mabie do, is not fairly 
to present them. We may not choose to give such stories 
of ^Esop as show the Greek admiration of successful 
theft and mendacity. But a realization of this inclusive 
view of " morality " in ancient story should discourage 
teachers and parents from trying to present the tales as 
illustrations of twentieth-century moral lessons! First 
of all these are good stories, to be wondered at and 
chuckled over and to cause gasps of consternation. Any 
version which goes beyond selecting what seems whole- 



1/ 



108 READING AND LITERATURE 

some and putting it before children — any version which 
falsely sentimentalizes or tacks on solemn comment or 
explanation — is a nuisance to be avoided. 

The more difficult stories of this group — the Arabian 
Nights and the Old Testament tales and the Greek 
myths as presented in Bulfmch's Age of Fable, for ex- 
ample — can be approached in the intermediate grades, 
especially if the teacher reads them aloud well. But rather 
than dim and spoil them by the usual inartistic retelling 
they had better be postponed to the junior high school 
years (grades seven through nine) if necessary. Certainly 
it is preferable, however, to present the delights of Alice 
in Wonderland and the best folk tales before they are, 
for a time, outgrown. The child has a somewhat scorn- 
ful attitude toward whimsical and absurd nonsense when 
he begins to form standards of exactness and probability, 
and for quite a time sees fit to banish make-believe from 
his small system, 

THE AWAKENING OF DEMANDS FOR PROBABILITY 

Gradually, under sensible guidance, the child grows 
beyond the crediting of utter impossibility and inconse- 
quence in stories. He will later return, as most of us 
enjoy doing, to the absurd tale as a relief from the binding 
reality of every day; but he wants to select what he can 
believe, and he is beginning to develop often wrong but 
earnestly applied criteria of truth.~^In helping him to do 
this better and more surely we have our greatest oppor- 
tunity for making significant and living the essential 
literary standards of reality and measurable truth to ex- 
perience. This should be a principal contribution of lit- 
erature teaching, in the grades particularly from the fourth 
or fifth on. 

This, we have seen, is a period of eager reaHing in 
romance and adventure. But children begin gradually, 



EXCELLENT LITERATURE 109 

now, to grow beyond belief in the cheapest impossibilities. 
They begin to make, that is, the difficult distinction be- 
tween what is incredible nonsense or magic and romance, 
and what is true, and to like each in its place. They 
will now and then declare, as we all do, that they like a 
tale of bravado and gasconade just because it is impos- 
sible. But it does not take much help for them to see that 
those stories are more, or at least quite differently, enjoy- 
able in which the hero wrests his victory in good part by 
his own excellent qualities and hard work, and does not 
sit to let it be whirled into his lap, or make empty 
gestures and alarms and excursions merely. Romance has 
always allowed its heroes the favor of chance or of the 
gods in doing mighty and even incredible deeds, but in the 
greatest romance the hero conquers by aid, also, of his 
own excellent qualities and hard work — his strength tre- 
mendously exerted, his wit and foresight. Odysseus is 
provided with the wimple of the goddess and is aided 
fugitively in the fearful combat; but it is also his sturdy 
and agonized swimming and his wisdom and matchless 
fortitude that establish him again in rocky Ithaca. Dis- 
covering such points, a boy achieves a distinct and valuable 
test for the real book and for the sham in his favorite 
domain of adventure. The youngster who said, " So- 
and-so [a hero of transcendent exploits] wouldn't be any 
good in this school ; he never did anything that was hard," 
had established a measure of value capable of wide appli- 
cations in judging achievement and character, not alone 
in literature, but in actual life. 

To get boys to applying such standards themselves, 
not to indoctrinate them by lectures on literary worth, is 
the sole hope of replacing the usually favored books with 
those giving a more true and wholesome picture of life. 
Dr. Jordan, in the study referred to before, 8 notes 
* Children's Interests in Reading, p. 122. 



no READING AND LITERATURE 

that Altsheler, like all the writers of equal appeal, makes 
little or no use in his war stories of sick fatigues and mad- 
dening monotonies and hours of agony. High-handed 
heroisms, uncanny prowess backed by pure luck or sudden 
accesses of kindliness in savage breasts, and all the swank 
and glamor of war are featured. Yet Altsheler's stories 
are quite among the best of the second-rate. They are not 
at all harmful as a phase of keen enjoyment for a time, 
provided they be replaced by better. They are far more 
wholesome and true than Alger's books, and better done 
than Henty's. 

Real harm comes, however, from the distorting omis- 
sion of reality in those popular stories which purport to 
give a true account of the Great War. Nobody much 
likes such ghastly truth as Stephen Crane first presented 
of the Civil War, 9 or as Barbusse and Phillip Gibbs and 
other earnest men, gifted with keen vision and with 
courage, present of the recent carnage, in scenes more 
vivid and awful than those of the Inferno. 1 * Yet it should 
be obvious that the highest comprehension and apprecia- 
tion of heroism cannot be had save as one sees and hears 
and feels, precisely as they were, these awfulest things 
that war entails. If heroism is to be anything to a boy 
beyond the strutting and rushing to glory of Guy Empey 
and Pat O'Brien, it must be through his realization of the 
true conditions of war. Moreover, that we advance him 
from the epic or romantic glorification of slaughter to a 
sense of what courage in reality is, and of what war 

9 A marine who fought in France tells me that The Red Badge 
of Courage pictures recognizably the fear of battle. And yet Crane 
knew no actual war. 

10 See Barbusse's Le Feu (translated as "Under Fire"), Phillip 
Gibbs' Now It Can be Told and More That Musi.be Told, and such 
verse as Siegfried Sassoon's Counter- Attack and the collections Poems 
Written During the Great War (George Allen and Unwin, London, 
1918) and Poems of the War and the Peace (Harcourt, Brace and 
Company, New York, 1921). 



EXCELLENT LITERATURE in 

means, may be more than a corrective of his literary tastes : 
it may mean making possible for him a courage that will 
stand against popular hysterical clamor in any country, 
and oppose the blindness of greed and cruelty that leads 
to wars. The boy may realize at last that 

Life may be given in many ways 

And loyalty to Truth be sealed 
As bravely in the closet as the field — 

So bountiful is fate. 

Such realization is difficult ; it is the more unattainable for 
every falsification of sentimentalist stage-heroics and 
glamorous pretense. 

VgTORIES OF SCHOOL AND SPORTS 

The same thing is of course true of school, sport, and 
scouting stories. Absurdities in this region we have suffi- 
ciently condemned. If the story of games and of boys' 
clubs and Scout patrols is of any value, it must be because 
it shows the truth that clean winning demands good-spirited 
working together and submersion of the urge to gallery 
play in the ambition to serve team and school. Too often 
the boys' story centers, for an obvious appeal, upon in- 
dividual glory and prestige, and even on downright mis- 
play. Few books of the sort make for good citizenship ; 
I have tried to list some of the best. But a frank dis- 
cussion of the most widely read bad examples with boys 
who know what team spirit means generally shows up, 
without any moralizing, what poor stuff such tales usu- 
ally are. 

We have noted already n the similar poverties and per- 
versions of ideal in the stories of girls' schools. But where 
such books as Louisa Alcott's and Mrs. Wiggin's are 
available, and are also on girls' distinctly preferred lists, 

u In Chapter III. — 



ii2 READING AND LITERATURE 

we need not attempt more than a fair and impartial com 
parison of these with the poorer kind. They are not th< 
highest sort of literature, but they are real and fairly true 
There is no need, and certainly no excuse, for a teacher* r 
lack of discrimination which fails to take account of the 
badness of the usual choice and the superior quality of th< 
equally appealing good. 

THE BEGINNING OF ADULT INTERESTS IN READING 

In the high-school years, it is easy to discover increas- 
ing interest in adult concerns. Dr. Jordan notes with the 
falling-off of devotion to juvenile fiction a slight increase 
in the comparatively infrequent reading of good biograph) 
and travel, and more attention to scientific books, account 4 
of construction and handwork, and magazines of currem 
events. There is less of this growth on the part of girls 
whose interests are apparently fewer and confined prin 
cipally to fiction. 12 The best development of these whole 
some interests in objective and useful matters will be con- 
sidered briefly in the latter part of this chapter. 

More clearly defined, and more significant and peril- 
ous, is the rapid increase in popularity of juvenile and 
adult love-stories. There is reason to deplore the large 
bulk of this sort of matter in most libraries — books 
which cannot be dignified by the name of literature, yet 
are ordered in quantity. 13 This interest appears in girh 
as early as eleven years old, and in boys more usually at 
about thirteen. It is of course natural, but in the present 
condition of the book market it is a most dangerous 
direction of attention. Enough has been said of the 
quality and effect of the usual bad story of this sort 
Fortunately there are a number of books presenting true 

"A. M. Jordan: Children's Interests in Reading, Chapters III 
and V. 

13 See the report of Mr. E. R. Glenn's study, pp. 131 ff-, below. 



EXCELLENT LITERATURE 113 

and wholesome ideals, to which we can direct attention 
and which are understandable by girls and boys of senior 
high-school age. Wholesome fun at the expense of calf- 
love and the absurd virtues it admires, provided the story 
is wholly friendly and not obviously an intrusion for 
ethical purposes, is quite effective and heartily enjoyed. 
An excellent illustration of this type is Bunner's The 
Tenor. 14 Alice Sit-by-the-Fire, though a more admirable 
treatment of this aberration, is unfortunately beyond the 
range of most high school people; it is indispensable for 
their teachers, as is Mr. Phillpotts' From the Angle of 
Seventeen. Mr. Booth Tarkington's Seventeen, though 
inartistically stretched out and forced in its humor 
toward the end, is a presentation which young people 
enjoy hugely and do not resent. In fact, they sometimes 
take it all quite seriously, as they do the burlesque in 
Rostand's The Romancers! Mrs. Rhinehart's stories of 
"Barbara, a Sub-Deb," and recent stories about "Sally 
Belle" in the Saturday Evening Post, on the other hand, 
are bad in capitulating to the very sentimentalism which 
they set out to ridicule. 

The great novels which truly present motives and 
emotions and their inevitable consequences are of course 
our chief reliance. The story of Godfrey Cass in Silas 
Marner, the tragic misadventures of Hetty Sorel in 
Adam Bede, of Maggie Tulliver, of Hester Prynne, and 
of Ethan Frome; the varied but commonplace romances 
of Edwin and Hilda Clayhanger, and of Constance and 
Sophia in Old Wives' Tales — these are types of stories 
which present, for individual pupils of sufficient ma- 
turity to read and understand them, honest and un- 
sparing pictures of love and its fair or tragic conse- 
quences. Clearly these are in most cases not material for 
class reading or for general recommendation ; most young 

"The first story in Short Sixes, an enjoyable collection. 
8 



ii4 READING AND LITERATURE 

people below college age are incapable of reading them 
with comprehension. Far less can we present them such 
pictures of tragic intensity as Mrs. Wharton's Summer, 
or Willa S. Cather's Pioneers! Only those whose 
calm maturity of judgment is wholly to be trusted can 
read these, or Mr. Galsworthy's tragedies Justice and 
The Fugitive, without serious misconception. 

But we are not therefore to be absolved from respon- 
sibility for presenting the truth about human relations. 
We must administer antidotes to the awful mis-tellings 
of popular novels, in which lack of restraint is made to 
appear as strength and beauty, and a zeal to do good puts 
girls, in particular, in a frame of mind to attempt impos- 
sible misalliances in the name of love. The teacher is 
bound to know all he can of this literature of funda- 
mental human relations ; he is bound to test its truth by 
the criteria of his own experience. And he must know 
all that he can of individual young people, of their con- 
ceptions and their maturity of view, so that he can safely 
direct their thought to what is true and fine, away from 
the dangerous grounds of untrue popular fiction. The 
subjects of highest importance are, in most novels of 
popular appeal, treated in false and misleading fashion; 
not to know this is inexcusable. Only realization of the 
danger, and preparation of our pupils through all pos- 
sible wholesome experience can help us avert serious 
ignorance, for whose results we cannot hold ourselves al- 
together excused. 

WHOLESOME COMRADESHIP 

One subject on which we can safely present all that is 
true and normal is the real bases of human companion- 
ship. We have seen in a previous chapter the curious 
root of sympathy and cooperation in a frequently silly 
and harmful instinct to pity and " fuss over " and mistend 



EXCELLENT LITERATURE 115 

whatever exhibits signs of distress. The sublime faith 
of most good people in the divinity and Tightness of every 
form of mothering instinct and of pity is reflected in 
much of our literature. Such futile and harmful 
emotionalizing is the common and quick-dying root 
of many human companionships and of families. The 
intrusion of scientific knowledge here, discouraging, 
for instance, foolish swaddling and cockering of children 
and irrational parental tyranny, is generally resented ; lit- 
erature is full of glorification of the family institution, 
and of course rightly in that it has best preserved the 
race and made possible its advance so far. But here, as 
often, " good " means in evolution only " good enough 
to keep the species from elimination," and " best " simply 
" the surest aids to survival that have happened to 
happen." 15 That reasonableness should be strongly en- 
couraged to influence human relations, of course, does not 
mean a discrediting, but merely a need of checking up 
and redirecting the forces nature has provided. 

Instinctive emotion — liking and misliking of this or 
that — is the root of intelligence; but it needs the fruition 
of intelligence. Obedience to natural law requires more 
sincere and earnest effort, to understand its bases and 
implications, than literature has usually aided. Like re- 
spect for human laws and conventions it is unlikely to be 
tendered merely because the laws are given out on high 
authority. Strong wills, with the capability of thought, 
must always experience first the effects of disobedience, 
directly or by vivid imaginative undergoing, before they 
pay respect. Thus, as we have noted, literature which 
is worthy must present true pictures of results — the re- 
sults that follow any subverting of law and convention, 
as for instance in Maggie Tulliver's story. 

15 Thorndike : Educational Psychology, I: 281. 



n6 READING AND LITERATURE 

Wholesome companionships also must be based on 
nothing less sound than real — and by no means easy — 
attempts at mutual understanding. An excellent treat- 
ment of this subject for the guidance of the teacher and of 
young people as well is presented in Stevenson's Old 
Mortality and in Mr. Bennett's The Feast of St. Friend. 16 
The necessity of trying to understand another person's 
point of view — deciding not what you would do in his 
place, but what he himself will do and would like you to 
do; the fundamental requirement that you attempt this, 
not wholesale, but for one person at a time, as a rigorous 
exercise of the imagination — all this is presented fairly 
in Mr. Bennett's essay. It brings realization that in- 
stinctive love or pity, fine and beautiful as it is in intent, 
is quite as often dangerous and hurtful as right in its 
results; that true sympathy is quite different and altogether 
more difficult; and that such sympathy, based on real 
comprehension and intelligent fellow-feeling, is alone cap- 
able of aiding human intercourse — in school-teaching as 
well as in friendship and marriage. Of all possible con- 
tributions from literature to true human understanding 
and to wise experience and life, here is one of the most 
significant and fruitful. 

2. IDEALS IN LITERATURE AND THEIR TRANSFERENCE 
INTO ACTION 

More, probably, has been said about ideals in litera- 
ture than on any other phase of the subject. And of 
course, if it is not to present ideals, is not to present the 
reality of highest human aspiration as well as the less 
pleasing actualities of observed action, literature is 
bound to be of the less account. " The great creative 
writer shows us the realization and the apotheosis of the 

"Reprinted as Friendship and Happiness (Doran). 



EXCELLENT LITERATURE 117 

day-dreams of common men," as Stevenson puts it. 17 
But the fundamental requirement, here as elsewhere, we 
have noted, is that the aspirations as well as the action be 
truly presented — that their results square with experience. 
It is this requisite that has been most constantly and 
dangerously ignored in our discussions of ideals in litera- 
ture. For here is the happy realm of the narrow-sighted 
moralist and thesis-monger, as well as of the hunter of 
cheap and quick sensations. 

THE FALSE IDEAL DISRESPECT FOR LAW 

The hero of a pestilent series of stories and moving 
pictures is an American abroad who directs a band of 
lawless men. He presides over a mock court in the cata- 
combs where social wrongs are redressed by his invariably 
just decrees and by force majeur. Another set of tales 
read by Americans in millions depicts a lawyer who uses 
sharp methods and extra-legal influence in the courts — 
always, of course, in a good cause — to redeem the victims 
of various social oppression. The uproarious success 
of a recent moving picture showing the Ku Klux sug- 
gests the popularity of this sort of fictions. Their ulti- 
mate consequences in further aggravation of our serious 
disrespect for law in this country, with its terrible record 
of lynchings, are to-day becoming more and more clearly 
visible. The suggestion has been made that not dis- 
respect for law on the part of our immigrants, but our 
own infectious lawlessness, left over from pioneer con- 
ditions, is responsible for crimes we charge these immi- 
grants with. 18 The propagation of this very serious 
American evil by weak and evil literature is one form of 
sentimentalism that we need most diligently to combat. 

" R. L. Stevenson : A Gossip on Romance. 

"Grace Abbott: "The Immigrant in the Courts," Chapter V of 
The Immigrant and the Community (Century, 1917). 



n8 READING AND LITERATURE 

To literature that presents true ideals honestly, every- 
body can of course heartily subscribe. It may depict the 
misery entailed upon other people and the shriveling-up 
of whatever is worth while in oneself which comes from 
narrowness of outlook, and dishonesty, and greed. A 
man who turns from all human companionship and com- 
fort because of real injustice done him of course suffers 
atrophy of thought and feeling; living with and in joy- 
ous child-life can effect mysterious resuscitation and 
wholesome growth in such an atrophied life; these pieces 
of experience, presented in genuinely living fashion, con- 
stitute the essential truth of Silas Marner's story. A life 
that pursues narrow and obvious adventure develops no 
soul that can survive the melting and recasting of the "but- 
ton-molder; " such is the story quaintly told in Peer 
Gynt. But mystical influences of a rather naive and silly 
goodness and trust, as in The Passing of the Third Floor 
Back, or of stupid optimism and blinking evasion of truth 
in "glad books," illustrate the decay of ideals into putres- 
cence. True ideals are the best strength of literature; 
false and blind, mistaken half -glances at life, mis- 
called presentations of the ideal, are its worst form 
of sentimentality. 

THE TRANSFERENCE OF IDEAL INTO ACTION 

We are not, however, as optimistic as we once were 
about the power of ideals to translate themselves into 
action. William James noted that unless we express an 
emotion or a belief in concrete fashion, it is likely to 
evaporate and leave little trace. 19 You remember the old 
gentleman in Rosmersholm who had cherished tremendous 
ideas for years in secret ; but when the time came to an- 
nounce them and he had hired a hall for the purpose, he 

19 William James : "Habit," in his Talks to Teachers. 



EXCELLENT LITERATURE 119 

discovered to his dismay that the sublime and regener- 
ative thoughts were simply not forthcoming. Dr. 
Thorndike further demolishes the notion that ideas have 
any power to take on form in words and acts. We have 
no proof, he says, that any idea or belief tends to express 
itself unless there already exists a connection in habit be- 
tween that particular idea and that action? For instance, 
there is no likelihood that a boy's ideal of heroism will be 
effective in moving him to a heroic deed ; only the habit 
of small heroisms unhesitatingly accomplished is a gen- 
uine force in this direction. No better illustration is 
possible than Lord Jim's standing on the deck of the 
training ship, dreaming busily of nobly and largely heroic 
actions in the style of Clark Russell's heroes, while his 
shipmates sprang to the rescue of a drowning comrade. 
This incident prepares us amply for his overt cowardice 
later. 21 Ideals are, in other words, likely to grow into the 
merest sentimentalism, rather than into genuine fineness 
of action. 

We may be pardoned for believing that influences 
which we cannot measure, whose genuine results we pass 
unrecognized, are set up from the contact of excellent 
literature: that physical and measurable act is not the 
sole way of building and confirming ideals as potent forces. 
We know beyond question, at any rate, that to examine 
into the growth of such ideals is merely to dig them out 
and prevent that growth. What we need to do is to de- 
vise situations wherein the qualities we desire to cultivate 
may show themselves naturally. The genuinely social 
classroom, in which pupils work on common problems and 
subordinate their individual ambition to the best success 
of the play or the school paper ; still better, the choice by 
the class of a pupil who needs an assignment or a part in 

20 E. L.. Thorndike; :. Educational Psychology I; 176-185, 
* Joseph Conrad : £&*-$ Jim, 



i2o READING AND LITERATURE 

the play, even though he does it less adequately than the 
brilliant pupil; the cordial assent of the rejected star, and 
his cooperation to help his successor 22 — these are illustra- 
tions of the highest and finest teaching of socially desirable 
ideals. The teacher who knows what he is about will say 
little or nothing of these chief est aims of his course ; but he 
will trust the excellent literature he selects for its effect, 
with little comment, and meanwhile will devise means 
for giving its best lessons an outlet for expression in 
homely everyday situations in the schoolroom. 

THE IDEAL OF GENUINE ACHIEVEMENT 

We shall give our pupils the most possible stories of 
genuine and excellent achievement, portrayals of the fight, 
now winning and now losing, against real evils. Ac- 
counts of force directed against ignorance and super- 
stition, as in the tales of Tennessee mountain schools, or 
against disease and filth, or against fraud in its in- 
sidious attack on one's character, as in Herrick's The Com- 
mon Lot, perform a genuine service because they present 
the finest fruition of men's instinctive pleasure in a fight. 
It is this high pleasure which has made men always de- 
light in the stories of crusades or wars waged for an 
ideal : the search for the Grail or for the Pole, the striving 
of St. Francis and of Savanarola, the heroic death of Cap- 
tain Scott, the long and varying battles with the slum, of 
Jane Addams or of Jacob Riis, the shrewd and broad- 
minded working toward an unswerving purpose in face 
of seemingly irreconcilable forces by Abraham Lincoln — 
these are the sort of loftiest heroism which grade-school 
and high-school pupils can appreciate keenly. Each is 
realized and enjoyed because it is a story of an uphill 
battle, with painful defeats, waged with unflagging per- 

32 Margaret M. Skinner: Socialising Dramatics, English Journal, 
October, 1920 (9:448). 



EXCELLENT LITERATURE 121 

severance. The force that inspires such achievement is 
the same that produces all conquests over warring and 
hostile forces of weakness, all achievements of scholarship, 
and all peaceful mastery of nature and of littleness and of 
evil. It is the privilege and responsibility of literature- 
teaching to give children a sense of the keen joy in worth- 
while achievement of the greatest sort — the satisfaction 
of Dr. Grenfell, and Helen Keller, and all who have battled 
unremittingly against limitations and dangers. Where 
hero worship centers on fine conquerors, where the delight 
of power and mastery is linked to conquests like these, 
where the very humiliation of failure is shown as beautiful 
in its sureness of right, there ideals are well shown 
through literature. >A most permanent and reconstructive 
good can be effected by informing the strong instinctive 
force of delight in struggle and achievement with intelli- 
gence and broad perception of true social good.^ 

IDEALS OF SOCIAL INFLUENCE 

So with other types of ideals which we wish to have 
our pupils realize as moving forces in human lives. The 
keenness of sensitive response to approval and scorn in 
girls and hence in girls' stories — in Little Women for 
example — shows itself oftenest in real suffering because 
of poor clothes and lack of small niceties of manner. It 
is for literature to present such sensitiveness as an essen- 
tial indicator of other people's opinion, but not as a de- 
termining force in strong lives. Stories of great and 
brave men and women who have defied convention and 
social approval for a higher idea are potent to correct petty 
manifestations of this instinctive response. Literature 
alone can much illuminate one's own small and narrow bit 
of experience, show the relative littleness of many per- 
sonal beliefs, and exhibit in their true light purposes to 
be followed. The boy's story and the girl's can picture 



122 READING AND LITERATURE 

social approval of acts which society recognizes as benefi- 
cent, like that of the nurse to-day; and it can show as 
well the indifference to social disapproval of Florence 
Nightingale, who made possible both this service and the 
approval that now crowns it. A balance between a decent 
respect for the opinions of mankind and a resolute scorn 
of those opinions where a wide and deep perception of 
right shows them petty and mean — this is the achieve- 
ment demanded of everyone whose acts are to count. Such 
balance is the safeguard against hysteria, which sweeps 
the crowd, and equally against blind sureness of egotistic 
views. Those who are to think for themselves have this 
to achieve. A great privilege of the teacher of literature 
is to help them achieve it. 

An ambition toward such great work can be the ideal 
of the teacher of literature. It is an ideal only partially 
to be realized, certain of constant defeats and long dis- 
couragements, but certain at least of doing its share of good 
in forming young people's minds to perception of the best 
life they can conceive. All that it requires in the teacher, 
of openness of mind and freedom from all prejudice 
against reality, insures him a lifetime of endeavor to edu- 
cate himself for and by the prosecution of his work. 

3. CLASSIC AND MODERN LITERATURE FOR SCHOOLS 

Discussion has abounded in educational meetings and 
journals of late years on the subject of classic versus 
modern material for pupils' reading. The question has been 
sagely debated : Should we begin with ancient material — 
with acknowledged masterpieces — or with those of the 
child's environment, with Homer or The Oregon Trail, 
with Elizabethan or contemporary drama? 

The meaninglessness of this antithesis is well shown. 



EXCELLENT LITERATURE 123 

by Horace in a clever passage of his Epistles. 23 He gives 
due reverence to the really fine work of early Latin 
writers, and of course to the Greek masterpieces, but in- 
sists that age, mere time, can in itself decide nothing as 
to literary excellence. We must have, obviously, criteria 
of excellence. It has been sufficiently emphasized here 
that no one can have any sure criteria who does not know 
the great things which have stood, and will probably 
stand always, amid the ruck of the cheap and perishing. 
For passages of excellent poetry and prose furnish, in 
Matthew Arnold's phrase, touchstones by which we can 
assay other matter that we read. But it is a frequent and 
disastrous fallacy to assume that any enduring work is, in 
the merely accidental particulars of its form or its sub- 
stance, to measure any other work. From studying great 
literature we must determine as well as we can the roots 
of its greatness and permanence. And in the degree that 
we do this successfully we can derive authentic standards 
for our own judgment. But that these standards must 
be applied as cautiously and sensibly to the classic as to the 
modern seems hardly open to question. 

As to choice of literature for children, our contention 
that we must begin where children actually are, must find 
out the sort of thing they do prefer and read with delight, 
does not mean that we are to rest there. Our determina- 
tion of their actual preferences is useful mainly in choos- 
ing for our pupils the really fine things that will 
make a similar appeal. And we are not the less likely 
on that account to select for them great and classic litera- 
ture. For, indeed, many ancient writings are closer to the 
ideas and experiences of our young people to-day than are 
any contemporary ones. Few recent stories, with their 
commonly adult and sophisticated ideas and manner, can 

23 Horace : Epistles; Book II, Epistle I (Wickham translation, Ox- 
ford, 1903). 



i2 4 READING AND LITERATURE 

equal the appeal of genuine folklore and legend ; , rare 
exceptions which are genuinely of the folk tradition only 
confirm the appeal of ancient story. I know no drama 
of adventure written in our time that can compare in its 
power of interesting children with the direct action and 
character revelation of Shakespeare's Julius CcBsar. And 
this in spite of immense difficulties of wording and an 
altogether foreign, Elizabethan setting, spirit, and stage 
tradition. How these difficulties are to be overcome is 
subject for another portion of this study. Our procedure 
from the child's own unguided selection of what is often 
bad and base to what is really great and fine will, then, be 
as often to go direct to the admitted classics as to the pre- 
cisely modern. And we shall do this on no fine-spun theory 
of " culture epochs," but simply because we know the 
preferences of real children. 

Professor Thomas well contends that whatever is 
commonly taught in school courses has a presumption in 
its favor; there is so much to be said for getting together 
a common fund of experience among all men that we 
should not without good reason, from any mere personal 
crochet or dislike, neglect to teach what is usually taught 
in schools. 24 On the other hand, we cannot push this 
principle too far. We need to recognize definitely that 
understanding and appreciation of literary classics is de- 
termined, beyond our power to modify it substantially, by 
the inborn capacities of children. Great classic literature 
has never been read and appreciated by such percentages 
of the population as now flock into our high schools. For 
the pupils who are not going to college and will never 
have further literature courses we want certainly to pro- 
vide the best possible experience of high thought and per- 
ception of life. It is altogether wrong to suppose, for 

24 C. S. Thomas : The Teaching of English in Secondary Schools 
(Boston, 1917), PP- ii3 f- 



EXCELLENT LITERATURE 125 

example, that boys of coarse fiber and little or no back- 
ground of books and thought are unable to appreciate 
poetry. After I had read for a half -hour a series of 
Kipling's stirring narrative poems, one such boy com- 
mented: "Gee, that's real poetry; nothing about pussy 
willows in that." But we shall probably not succeed best 
by giving this sort of boy the beautiful lyrics of Milton — 
which many high school pupils indeed can in some measure 
apprehend, but by no means all. 25 We must find where our 
pupils actually are in experience and power of thought 
and appreciation, and give them the best possible literature 
that they can reach and assimilate. And we must con- 
stantly test our results by encouraging frankly their ques- 
tions and their honest expression of value. 

We shall want, however, to get such comment as they 
may give after they have honestly attempted mastery of 
poem or story or essay and then assessed what they 
have gained. While they are making the attempt to under- 
stand, attention should be upon the thing to be done ; only 
when it has been earnestly mastered are they in a position 
to help themselves, and us, in judging its worth for them. 
Only such a procedure can achieve a real teaching of liter- 
ary appreciation, which is simply vital understanding. 

To summarize the criteria proposed for choosing lit- 
erature that will be at the same time worthy and fine, and 
fitted to children's understanding and liking : We_need to 
secure that which portrays in its happenings, truly and 
without sentimentalizing and falsification, men's actual 
deeds and motives and ideas and their real consequences.^ 
Where it presents weakness and wrong, the literature we 
choose must show forth the individual and social results 
of such actions as they really are — not in a narrow con- 

95 This point is admirably stated in F. T. Baker's "The Teacher 
of English," E. J, (2: 335) June, 1913. 



126 READING AND LITERATURE 

sideration of effect upon one or two persons alone, but so 
far as possible in the totality of influence upon the society 
of which they form a part. Such presentation of life 
steadily and — in a limited sense — whole has been often 
cited as the crowning merit of great literature. Its 
peculiar importance for children with unformed standards 
is sufficiently obvious. It is the first criterion for sep- 
arating the measurably good from the altogether 
inadmissible. 

Not only must such literature present truth to life; 
it must contain only such matter as is within the child's 
understanding and experience, and consequently within 
his power of fair judgment. Literature portraying adult 
experience cannot be realized by children until they have 
themselves a basis in their own concrete sensations and ob- 
servations for thinking about it and for dramatizing the 
experiences of grown people. But a principal responsi- 
bility of the teacher is noting the origins of impulses to 
fuller experience, and feeding them wholesomely with 
the very best; for this in particular, his knowledge of 
children in literature and especially of the individual chil- 
dren he has to deal with is peculiarly requisite. 

B. BOOKS WITH VALUES AS SUBJECT MATTER 

So far we have considered only literature proper — the 
imaginative reconstruction of experience. We have had 
nothing to say of matter with scientific or historical or 
practical values. As we have seen, literature may or may 
not have such values as exact knowledge; that they are 
faithful records of historical or biological fact does not 
make the writings of Motley and Parkman or of Fabre 
and Burroughs either more or less really literature. As 
English teachers we are interested in the lively por- 
trayals of new experiences and new backgrounds of life; 



EXCELLENT LITERATURE 127 

we care little for the historical fidelity of the incidents 
and the characters, so they be convincing; if they trans- 
port us to new scenes, these may be in such impossible 
places as the seacoast of Bohemia, or include anomalous 
mixtures of Roman personages and Eizabathan cos- 
tume and custom. The historian and the scientist are 
eager for honest fidelity to the facts of their studies. We 
care only incidentally for this. It is our business as. 
teachers of literature to preserve a corner of the modern 
practical and vocational school for wholesome broad- 
ening and deepening of experience, quite irrespective of 
its scientific interest or its geographic information or its 
practical usefulness in fitting boys and girls to jobs. 

Nevertheless, we must realize that " the child is after 
all one; we cannot be parties to dismembering him." 26 
We must learn to cooperate in every possible way with 
teachers of other subjects, towards building many-sided 
experiences for our pupils. Here our colleagues can be 
of great help to us in extending our pupils* breadth and 
appreciation of life. One of our fundamental criteria, we 
have suggested, can well be honest truth to human ex- 
perience; and while small historical inaccuracy or er- 
roneous scientific conceptions may be of no importance, 
clearly, flagrant violations of truth to such experience in 
history as the cheap idealizings of war in popular ad- 
venture books and poems, or the sentimentalizing or 
downright misrepresenting of nature in many grade- 
school texts in place of reasonable fidelity of account 
and closeness of observation, may disqualify any book 
from standing in the reading lists for literature as well 
as for science or history. We need to consult with our 
colleagues in making our choices that touch their subjects. 

21 Professor W. S. Hinchman's comment. 



128 READING AND LITERATURE 

CRITERIA FOR SUBJECT-MATTER BOOKS 

The same first criterion should be held for choosing 
books valuable for subject matter as for those of purely 
literary or general-experience value: They must really 
broaden and deepen experience; else they are mere " arid 
areas of dates and dynasties " and not living history — 
shorthand statements of technical matters and not science. 
I am not of course attempting to judge what precisely may 
represent experience to various readers; to the mathe- 
matically trained I am told that formulae are imagin- 
atively alive; a scientific shorthand that seems to the out- 
sider crabbed and perverse is undoubtedly quick with 
meaning to the expert chemist. But there are dangers of 
abuse in this, as Professor MacCracken wittily shows in 
an analysis of typical scientific nonsense. 27 All that we 
need to note here is that a book of value for its historical 
or scientific content, if it is to pass muster under our 
criteria, must be clearly realizable matter of experience, 
and not mere words for memory and recitation. 

Standards for judging texts and readings are here 
suggested, then, in addition to other departments' tests 
of accuracy and essential completeness and relevancy of 
their subject matter. The usual geography book with its 
statements : " Much gold is produced near Sitka " and 
" Leather goods and shoes are manufactured at Law- 
rence" is well denounced by Dr. Bachman ; 28 it is made up 
simply of statements that induce no realization — that are 
capable of no use save memorizing and lifeless repeating 
at recitation or examination. A great part of the facts 
learned in schools is of no irreplaceable value, since anyone 
in need of information like this could easily learn to find 

2T Canby and Others: English Composition (Macmillan, 1913 ed.), 
p. 156. 

28 Quality versus Quantity in Subject Matter, Elementary School 
Journal, xv, pp. 491 and 529. 



EXCELLENT LITERATURE 129 

it when he needed it without having meanwhile carried 
it for several years in memory. We need to sort out 
carefully the body of information essential to be learned 
in any subject and then see that this really is mastered. 29 

There is a fundamental need for cooperation of de- 
partments for securing reading matter that is in its 
essentials real, because it enables us to recreate imagin- 
atively other experiences. There are quantities of such 
material — records of exploration, pictures of life in other 
times and in strange conditions and places, the best sort of 
biography, and eminently useful matters like accounts of 
industry — Mr. Joseph Husband's and Mr. Poole's and 
the like. Provided a book meets the test of our colleagues, 
of fidelity and importance of fact, they may be willing 
to modify some of their demands for rigorous logical 
completeness of all the range of their subject, and look 
more to the art with which experience is so reconstructed 
as to take the child from where he actually is, in space and 
time and knowledge, into totally new regions and ideas. 
Matter of this sort can well be assigned jointly; 30 as we 
shall see later, 31 the English teachers can aid pupils in the 
technique of interpretation. 

In very many ways, starting from our own immediate 
neighborhood and small dot of time, we can tremen- 
dously extend the horizons of our young people. Museum 
trips, pictures and motion pictures, and expeditions to 
such places as will help to reconstruct our pupils' view are 
simple but efficient means of expanding horizons. Re- 

23 G. F. Reynolds : " For Minimum Standards in Literature," 
Illinois Bulletin, May, 1920. 

30 An opposing view — that subject-matter books should be barred 
from the English lists — is well presented by Clara N. Hawkes : 
"Outside Reading," Illinois Bulletin (11, No. 7), April 1, iqio, 

31 Chapter V. 

9 



i 3 o READING AND LITERATURE 

ports by various children on different phases of the same 
problem, discovered in various books, often give pur- 
pose to the work. And the mass of available materials 
is almost limitless, from Government bulletins to Boy 
Scout and other handy books — on things to do or make, 
on wonders of engineering, and the like ; from periodicals 
of popular science to journals and bulletins of the Ameri- 
can Geographical Society; from daily newspapers and 
other immediate records of current happenings to the 
most complete but also real and realizable accounts of 
ancient civilizations. Just so far as these materials are 
honest and living presentments of reality so put before us 
and linked to our direct sense store that we can experience 
them, just so far they are worthy a place in our reading 
lists. For our own purposes we shall separate them from 
the literature proper which is primarily concerned with 
significant human experience and is apart from any 
interest in exact scientific data and historical progression. 
For we shall want to insure that a place is maintained for 
broadening experience as experience. But everything that 
worthily extends the boundaries of our interests and our 
vision of life is grist to our hoppers ; provided it ensures 
imaginative re-living of significant experience, it is so 
far excellent. 

The lists in the appendix are made out with the co- 
operation of teachers in other departments who consider 
that for their purposes the books named are serviceable 
records. They are, many of them, in need of further test- 
ing to insure that they do actually bring to young people 
a sense of really taking part in the experience portrayed. 
That much more of the sort of materials here suggested 
needs to be sought out and put into school libraries is 
sufficiently obvious; but that it should be chosen with a 



EXCELLENT LITERATURE 131 

view to the criteria suggested in this chapter is 
equally important. 

C. THE PROBLEM OF SCHOOL-LIBRARY LISTS 

A most important contribution to our analysis of the 
materials desirable in library and classroom has been made 
recently by Mr. Earl R. Glenn, of the Lincoln School of 
Teachers College. 32 Mr. Glenn's study consisted of dis- 
covering the proportions of books for various depart- 
ments in a great many high-school libraries, as shown by 
the classifications in their published reading lists. The 
sort of results typical of all the collections examined is 
shown graphically in the chart below: (Fig. 1.) The 
books classified as " English Literature " and " Fiction," 
apparently secured on recommendation of the English 
teachers and the librarians, most amazingly outnumber 
and overbalance those of all other departments. They 
constitute on the average almost fifty per cent, of the total 
number of books. These and history total over seventy- 
eight per cent. The point made by the author of this study 
is simply that for the gaining of all-round experience by 
our pupils some more equitable distribution should be 
attempted. Mr. Glenn is not organizing an attack on 
the English collection; he rightly realizes that, properly 
used, this comprises the greater part of the laboratory 
equipment for English. He knows, too, that the inaction 
of science and arts teachers is doubtless responsible for 
the meagerness of their share of books, and that in any 
case the materials of real value for their subjects are cer- 
tain to be fewer than for English. 

But I think it must occur to anyone who examines the 

32 E. R. Glenn: The Relation of the School Library to the 
Teaching of Science, a preliminary report in the Proceedings of the 
National Education Association, 57 : 460-1 ; fully presented in 
School Science and Mathematics (21: 217), March, 1921, and in the 
Library Journal, March 15, and April 1, 1921 (16: 247 and 297). 



132 



READING AND LITERATURE 



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For example, a list for high school libraries by Martha Wilson 
recently published by the Bureau of Education. It should be noted 
that this list has the authorization of no educational body; but it is 
an improvement on actual conditions as shown by Mr. Glenn's study. 



EXCELLENT LITERATURE 133 

large proportion of really dead and unused books, and too ^ 
often, also, books of doubtful quality, in these English 
lists. There should first of all, be no place whatever for 
"fiction" which is not really literature according to essen- 
tial standards of reality, truth, and significance. The 
failure of English teachers themselves to test carefully 
the literature which is added to the school library is in 
great part responsible for the inclusion of poor and even 
pernicious books. Moreover, there is in most high-school 
libraries a great disproportion of books of literary criti- 
cism, which the teachers have doubtless read in graduate 
courses, and may even now refer to, but which are of little 
or no value to the children — simply getting between them 
and the literature itself — if by any chance they read them. 
I once heard what I can readily believe was a true tale of 
a normal school student, who had never read such authors 
as Wordsworth and Lamb and Coleridge, being sent to the 
library with an assignment in Pater's Appreciations. This 
beautiful book was of course far too good for her. There 
should be in the school library a fair proportion of books 
and magazines for the teachers ; these will doubtless be a 
stimulating and directing influence to the best and most 
mature students. But I believe that examination of actual 
collections will convince any teacher that there is need of a 
general house-cleaning in at least the English corner of the 
library, and a use for better choices of whatever money 
a lot of the books will produce at second hand. 

It seems an eminently reasonable demand that every 
book which the school library and the teacher promote 
should be at least so good that a cultivated grown person 
who has sensibly preserved a pleasant childlikeness of view 
and a wholesome enjoyment of excellent nonsense and 
fairy tales, may read it without impatience at its serene 



i 3 4 READING AND LITERATURE 

regardlessness of human experience or at its condescending 
or cheaply flippant tone. 

The school library has clearly no place for two sorts 
of books frequently found there : 

1. Untested books, which the teacher orders on the 
chance that they may possibly be what he wants ; most 
books can be got for examination before they are ordered, 
and they should be carefully examined according to 
definite and high standards. 

2. Adult reading-matter — except a reasonable propor- 
tion of books for the advancement of teachers in their 
subjects and their profession; particularly, all "fiction" 
which has not very clear right to be classed as literature 
by such canons as have been proposed here ; the school 
library should in no way rival the circulating library in 
stocking modern one-act plays or short-stories and 
novels in general, but must give children the best in lit- 
erature and the arts and sciences — certainly a huge 
enough task. 

The disproportion and lack of careful selection in 
school libraries is the more unfortunate, and even danger- 
ous, because now a worthy effort is being made for en- 
larging these libraries to adequacy and for supplying them 
in schools which actually have none. Reasonable minimal 
costs per pupil have been arrived at and the size and 
equipment of libraries for schools of various sorts and 
sizes determined. 34 The good of such propaganda is of 
course clear ; every teacher should secure and use the com- 
mittee's report. But it will not be an unmixed good if the 
buying of books proceeds according to precedents now at 
hand. The need is for many and excellent real books, in 
as many departments of life as possible. Now, especially, 
we need breadth of view. The prevalent vocational en- 

34 C. C. Certain, Chairman: Report of the Committee on Library 
Organization and Equipment. American Library Association, 8 Wash- 
ington Street, Chicago (40c). 



EXCELLENT LITERATURE 



i35 



.AJUMBER Of VOLUMES OR 



SCALE I UNIT 




/JUMBER OF VOLUMES OR PUPIL 



CALE ONE 



l/N|T=ZO 



thusiasm is likely to result too often in shunting assorted 
round and square children into precisely fitting but tiny 
specialized vocations, and altogether or very largely shut- 



i 3 6 READING AND LITERATURE 

ting them away from any view of the life outside their 
particular round or square hole. We need the more, as 
Dr. Dewey expresses it, 35 to fit for many vocations — 
that of parent and intelligent citizen, and spender of a 
family budget, and enjoyer of the finest, most significant 
experience, as well as that of some kind of producer 
merely. We dare not omit, also, the highest possible cul- 
tivation of excellent experience in living, quite apart from 
any practical or utilitarian purpose ; we need always broad 
breathing-space for literature proper, and we intend to see 
that this is provided. But we want to secure, with the co- 
operation of our colleagues in history and science and 
arts, the fullest and most real and excellent experience of 
the materials of their subjects. So far as the tests of 
realizability and of truth to subject matter can be jointly 
applied by the various departments, such material can be 
generously provided for the excellent school libraries which 
are sought by the library committee, and by everyone who 
desires and works for good schools. 36 

Of such fine and wholesome literature and of books of 
with subject-matter values there is no lack. The lists in the 
appendix, under various school subjects, give only a small 
selection, such as any school library may well contain, from 
the available stores. As Professor Hosic has well said of 
elementary schools — it is as true of high schools — we 
have been most unwise in needlessly limiting children's 
excellent literary adventures, in having small, stupid and 
unusable collections of books in place of the broad and 
fine ones possible, and so in leaving their hunger for ex- 
perience to be satisfied by the more miscellaneous lists of 
the libraries and the silly and pernicious masses in book- 

35 John Dewey: Democracy and Education (Macmillan, 1917), 
p. 358 ff. 

36 The best statement of the relation of literature to school sub- 
jects is to be found in Chapter 18, "Reading as a Leisure Occupation," 
of Dr. Bobbitt's The Curriculum (Houghton, 1918). 



EXCELLENT LITERATURE 137 

shops. We need annotated texts less than we need 
larger and better school libraries. And we need, too, 
stores of pictures, and beautiful library and illustrated 
editions, and the like helps to vividness of life in reading. 
Only as we see this lack will our school teaching of read- 
ing and literature, and of other subjects as well, become 
less sterile and deadly than it often has been. Only so 
can it take on the color and feel of experience which chil- 
dren can enjoy and in which they will find enrichment of 
life. But it is not large numbers of books that we most 
need; it is excellent selection. Much more would be ac- 
complished, certainly, if we could persuade ourselves and 
our pupils to return again and again to the best books, and 
re-read them and reflect upon them in the light of fresh 
experience. It is rather by thorough mastery of a great 
piece of literature, by its complete digestion into one's own 
thought and life, than by cursory acquaintance with a 
great many, that true appreciation both of books and of 
one's own experience is achieved. 37 

3T A. H. R. Fairchild: The Teaching of Poetry (Boston, 1914), 
pp. xii, 162 ff., and 172-3 ; F. T. Baker : Introduction to " A Bibli- 
ography of Children's Reading," Teachers College Record, (9: 1 ff.) 
January, 1908). 

Note: More, probably, should have been made (on pp. 128-30) of 
children's keen and happy pursuit of mere information for its own 
sake, in encyclopaedias, almanacs, and the like; but the fact remains 
that this sort of thing contributes little if anything to the enrichment 
of experience which we are primarily discussing here. 



CHAPTER V 

AN EXAMINATION INTO THE TEACHING OF 
READING 

In order to secure through books such enlargement 
of experience as we desire, skill in reading — ability to 
understand what is represented by written or printed 
words — is of course a basic essential. We are likely to 
assume that children have this technical ability in all 
grades above the primary school, where it is supposedly 
mastered, and where assuredly its mastery should be well 
begun. But it is a grave error to make assumptions in 
this or any other question of children's learning. We must 
first of all find out specifically and accurately what 
individual children can do in the understanding of 
sentences and larger units, what they misunderstand or 
fail to grasp. Thus we can provide a definite basis for our 
attempts to teach reading. In the largest sense, we may 
repeat, comprehension is determined chiefly by the pre- 
vious experiences and ideas which one has at hand, to 
reconstruct into the new experiences suggested in books. 
But certain ways of bringing one's equipment to bear, in 
the process of interpreting black marks on white paper, 
are a necessary part of the business, and the inventory 
of these specific skills is the subject of this chapter. 

It is most desirable always to confine the study of the 
technique of reading — of sentence construction and word- 
study, gains in speed, and the like — to special periods of 
reading; and it is better to use subject matter of a prac- 
tical sort — the text in arithmetic or geography or general 
science, for example. Dr. Ernest Horn well suggests the 
need, as yet unsupplied, of text books designed especially 

138 



TESTING OF READING 139 

for this purpose, and provided with definite apparatus for 
measurement and informal testing of understanding. 1 
But until we have these we can best use the texts and 
readings recommended in large part for their value as 
subject matter, 2 

Study of technique of reading should never, if this 
can be avoided, be obtruded into the literature periods. 
There other ends are desired and other methods of gain- 
ing them are imperative ; there mastery of necessary tech- 
nique should be required, but it should be assumed; that 
is, genuine difficulties may be best met with immediate help, 
not with diversion to drills in grammar or in looking up 
definitions. At the same time, discovery of serious lacks 
in the technique of comprehension should be noted for 
mastery in separate lessons later. Let the technique of 
reading occupy its due place, have its strong, real and 
sensible purposes, and demand honest effort in mastering 
real and not trumped-up difficulties; let the literature 
periods be of another quality, without intrusion of moral, 
geographical, or grammatical lessons. For literature we 
desire a different attitude — rather of zestful adventure 
than of conscious purpose to master difficult problems. 

This does not, of course, mean that any one lesson 
hour may not be divided for various sorts of work. An 
hour period, for instance, such as modern high schools 
frequently have, might be very well given in part to lit- 
erature — the reading and discussion of a poem or story — 
and in part to composition work or to grammar or word 
study; but in such a system it is well to keep accurate 
record of time-division so that the teacher's zeal in one 
sort of study and dislike of another shall not distort 
reasonable proportions. 

1 Ernest Horn : "Selection of Silent-Reading Textbooks" : Journal 
of Educational Research, October, 1920 (11:615). 

2 See the lists in Appendix II, pp. 371, ff. 



i 4 o READING AND LITERATURE 

A. FINDING THE PUPILS' LEVEL OF ABILITY IN READING 

We must first find just what our pupils are able to 
comprehend when they are confronted with simple and 
presumably understandable reading matter. This is a 
most difficult business, and we cannot assume that such 
experiments and tests as we make are more than a fair 
indication. But what we can do, as indicated here, is a 
huge improvement over the guesswork and assumption 
which have been too common in all our teaching here- 
tofore. When a pupil reads the words of a problem in 
arithmetic — a problem, for instance, of figuring the bat- 
ting averages of players in a league baseball team, or of 
finding out the proportion of income paid for rent by a 
family in Chicago — the first difficulty he meets is simply 
one of reading; does he, before all else, understand accu- 
rately the precise conditions as they are put before him? 
Mathematics teachers realize that a large part of their job 
is teaching children to read intelligently. And so for his- 
tory, and science, and directions in shop and cooking. At 
the basis of all teaching lies this fundamental necessity. 

TESTING SPEED AND COMPREHENSION IN READING 

For meeting this primary difficulty with full knowledge 
of the facts various " comprehension tests " have been de- 
vised of late years. They consist, at best, of paragraphs of 
such reading matter as can be found in school texts and 
reading books of the various grades, with questions or di- 
rections following which give the reader a chance to show 
that he has understood what he read. In the Thorndike 
"Alpha 2" tests, for example, questions are asked which get 
at fundamental difficulties and find out whether the pupil 
has mastered those. The advantage such tests have over the 
most careful observation by a teacher is that they have 



TESTING OF READING 141 

themselves been tested by the replies of thousands of school 
children. For this reason, too, one can tell by a pupil's 
score whether he has or has not done as well as the average 
for his grade or age, and can compare one's own class with 
many others. Checks like this are especially valuable 
for determining the best procedures in teaching. 

As illustrations of the comprehension tests and of what 
we find when we apply them I am permitted to quote part 
of an article by Dr. E. L. Thorndike on Reading as Reas- 
oning: a Study of Mistakes in Paragraph Reading. 3 As 
a simplest possible example of the way the scales reveal 
difficulties, we may examine paragraph D of the compre- 
hension scale "Alpha 2, A Scale for Measurement of the 
Understanding of Sentences. " The paragraph follows: 

D. John had two brothers who were both tall. Their 
names were Will and Fred. John's sister, who was short, 
was named Mary. John liked Fred better than either 
of the others. All these children except Will had red 
hair. He had brown hair. 

Question 6 on this paragraph was: "Who had red hair?" 
It looks inescapable, doesn't it? You would hardly 
suppose that children in grades 6, 7, and 8 would have 
serious difficulty in answering it right. The directions are : 
" Read [the paragraph] again as often as you need to." 
Here is the precise record derived from testing several 
hundred children: 

One-fifth (20 per cent.) of the children in these grades 
(6-8) answered, " Will had red hair" ; two-fifths (40 per 
cent.) of those in grades 4-6 answered in this way, 
altogether omitting except. 

One-twentieth (5 per cent.) of the children in grades 

3 Journal of Educational Psychology, viii, 323 ff. 



i 4 2 READING AND LITERATURE 

6-8 answered " Will, Fred and John " or " all the chil- 
dren" or ''all;" they omitted entirely "except Will." 4 " 

One more example — the result of testing 200 sixth- 
grade children with the following sentence (/of the scale) : 

In Franklin, attendance upon school is required of 
every child between the ages of seven and fourteen on 
every day when school is in session unless the child is so 
ill as to be unable to go to school, or some person in his 
house is ill with a contagious disease, or the roads are 
impassable. 

Question 2 on this was : " On what day would a ten-year- 
old girl not be expected to attend school? " Here are the 
percentages of some rather astonishing answers — not the 
numbers of children, but the number per hundred : 

Unanswered 6% 

" Unless the child is so ill as to be unable 

to go to school " 41 

" On her birthday " 6^ 

" On every day," or " any day " Ay 2 

" On Monday," or " Friday," or " on Mon- 
day and for 5 days a week " 2^2 

" When his baby or brother have some kind 

of disease " 1 

" fourteen year," and " On her fourteenth 

birthday " 1 

"Age 11" % 

" She is allowed to go when six years " . . . . y 2 

" A very bad throat " y 2 

"When better" y 2 

If you suspect these results of being selected by testing 
children of subnormal intellect only, try them on your own 
classes and see what you get. If you have really average 

4 How many readers of this study supposed for years, as I did, that 
Atlanta is on the seaboard, from careless reading (singing) of the line: 
" From Atlanta to the sea? " 



TESTING OF READING 143 

pupils, you will probably discover results not essentially 
different from the averages here. 

As Dr. Thorndike points out, 5 many of these same 
children would respond correctly if confronted with the 
following questions: 

Is this foolish or is it not? 

The day when a girl should not go to school 

is the day when school is in session. 
The day, etc., is Monday. 
The day . . .. is fourteen years. 
The day . . . is age seven. 
The day . . . is a very bad throat. 

The children simply have not learned to test their re- 
sponses to reading -matter in ways like this, to see whether 
they have or have not found the sense of it. This is 
strongly reminiscent, by the way, of the responses of many 
grown people to the prose and poetry tests ! 6 If everybody, 
teachers as well as pupils, had been taught to question what 
statements mean, to test them for reasonablness and prob- 
ability, and to relate them to each other and to the topic 
under discussion, much more sensible results would surely 
have been attained in the testing of both adults and pupils. 

Professor W. S. Gray, of Chicago University, has de- 
vised elaborate series of oral- as well as silent-reading tests 
in which the pupil's understanding is checked both by ques- 
tions and by his attempt to reproduce what is read. As 
Mr. Courtis points out, 7 reproduction is rather more a com- 
position than a comprehension test, but it gives results 
useful to any English teacher. Teachers should be familiar 

5 Op. cit. p. 330. 

6 See Teachers College Record 22: 101, cited above. 

7 S. A. Courtis : The Gary Public Schools : Measurement of 
Classroom Products; pp. 314 ff. ; 445 (General Education Board, 
New York City, 1919). 



i 4 4 READING AND LITERATURE 

with Dr. Gray's presentations of this subject. 8 These 
scales, however, require individual testing — they are 
a monumental illustration of the patience and thorough- 
ness of scientific studies of this sort — and hence they are 
less practicable than others for use in classrooms. More- 
over, both this and Dr. Brown's study 9 test memory of 
the matter read, as if this were an essential to comprehend- 
ing, and not quite a different and separate ability. For this 
reason they are inferior for our purposes to other and 
later tests or scales. 

Another sort of study is Dr. W. S. Monroe's revision 
or the original Kansas Silent Reading Tests. 10 These 
consist of sentences of directions much like those in mathe- 
matics and science texts ; the ability to understand shown 
by following these directions is like the reading ability 
needed in most school subjects, and is worth careful investi- 
gating. These tests, however, have not proved as valu- 
able as those of Courtis and Thorndike. 

For grades two to six, excellent parallel tests of com- 
prehension and of speed in silent reading have been devised 
by Mr. S. A. Courtis. 11 These are similar in plan to the 
Thorndike reading scale already described ; that is, they test 
the understanding of matter that lies before the reader for 
reference in case he needs to look again. All the questions 
in this test are answered by yes or no. Of comprehension 
of what is read, the objective point of this part of our 
study, The Courtis Standard Research Tests; Silent Read- 
ing No. 2, for the grades below the seventh, and the Thorn- 

8 W. S. Gray: Studies of Elementary-School Reading through 
Standardised Tests — University of Chicago Press, 1917. See bibli- 
ography, Appendix I, p. 354, ff. 

9 H. A. Brown: Measurement of the Ability to Read: New Hamp- 
shire Dept. of Public Instruction, 1916. 

10 Walter S. Monroe: Standardised Silent Reading Test: See 
bibliography, Appendix I, p. 354, ff. 

11 Courtis Standard Research Tests : Silent Reading Test No. 2 
(The Kitten Series). See bibliography, Appendix I, p. 354, ff. 



TESTING OF READING 145 

dike-McCall tests for the fourth through the eleventh or 
twelfth grades, appear to be accepted as the most satisfac- 
tory measures. 12 

Another sort of tests have been recently devised by 
May Ayers Burgess, and are described in the Twentieth 
Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Edu- 
cation, Part II, 192 1. These consist of paragraphs of 
equal difficulty, and on each the pupil's success in following 
directions is tested. This success is measured wholly by 
the amount he can do in a given time ; only one thing is 
thus measured. These tests may be obtained through the 
Russell Sage Foundation, New York City. Those so far 
developed apply to the primary grades. 

Below are given ( 1 ) two paragraphs from the Courtis 
Silent Reading Test No. 2 (form 3), with the questions 
which the children answer; and (2) two paragraphs, one 
representing a fourth-grade standard and the other repre- 
senting — " only a provisional estimate," as Dr. Thorndike 
notes — ability to be expected in the second year of high 
school. This is from Scale Alpha 2, for Measuring the 
Understanding of Sentences. 1 



13 



I. THE COURTIS TESTS 

Flop, flop, went the fish, nearer and nearer to the 
edge. Kitten forgot to be afraid of the water. Quick as 
a flash down went his paws with all the little claws out. 
The fish could not get away. 

61. Did Kitten put out all his little claws? 

62. Did it take him long to catch the fish? 

63. Was Kitten afraid of the wet fish? 

64. Could the fish get away from his claws?. . 

65. Did the fish flop nearer to the edge? 

11 The best discussion of the problem of testing in reading is to 
be found in Mr. Courtis' study of the Gary schools, referred to above. 
See bibliography, Appendix I, p. 354. 
10 



i 4 6 READING AND LITERATURE 

The children shouted for joy. " Captain Kitten^ is a 
great fisherman, too," they cried, rushing home to 
Mother. " There would have been no fish in the basket 
if it had not been for our brave little Kitten." 

66. Did Mother help Kitten catch the fish?. . 

67. Did they take the fish home to Mother?, . 

68. Were they sorry he caught the fish? 

69. Did the children call Kitten brave? 

70. Was there only one fish in the basket?. .— 14 

2. THE THORNDIKE TESTS 
SET II. DIFFICULTY 5.25 

Read this and then 'write the answers. Read it again 
if you need to. 

Long after the sun had set, Tom was still waiting for 
Jim and Dick to come. " If they do not come before nine 
o'clock," he said to himself, " I will go on to Boston 
alone." At half-past eight they came, bringing two other 
boys with them. Tom was very glad to see them and 
gave each of them one of the apples he had kept. They 
ate these and he ate one too. They all went on down 
the road. 

1. When did Jim and Dick come?. 

2. What did they do after eating the apples ?..'„. 

3. Who else came besides Jim and Dick? 

4. How long did Tom say he would wait for them ? 

SET V. DIFFICULTY 8 

Read this and then write answers to I, 2, 3 and 4. 
Read it again if you need to. 

M Reproduced by permission of Mr. S. A. Courtis. 



TESTING OF READING 147 

It may seem at first thought that every boy and girl 
who goes to school ought to do all the work that the 
teacher wishes done. But sometimes other duties pre- 
vent even the best boy or girl from doing so. If a boy's 
or girl's father died and he had to work afternoons and 
evenings to earn money to help his mother, such might 
be the case. A good girl might let her lessons go undone 
in order to help her mother by taking care of the baby. 

1. What is it that might seem at first thought to be true, 

but really is false ? 

2. What might be the effect of his father's death upon the 

way a boy spent his time? 

3. Who is mentioned in the paragraph as the person who 

desires to have all lessons completely done?. . . . 

4. In these two lines draw a line under every 5 that comes 

just after a 2, unless the 2 comes just after a 9. If 
that is the case, draw a line under the next figure 
after the 5 : 

5362541742 5,7 654925 3.8 6125 
47352392584792561 2 5*7 4 8 5 6 



'&' 



,-.•-■ 



Read this and then write the answers to 5, 6, 7 and 8. 
Read it again if you need to. 

In Franklin, attendance upon school is required of 
every child between the ages of seven and fourteen on 
every day when school is in session unless the child is so 
ill as to be unable to go to school, or some person in 
his house is ill with a contagious disease, or the roads 
are impassable. 

5. What is the general topic of the paragraph? 

6. How many cases are stated which make absence 

excusable ? 



i 4 8 READING AND LITERATURE 

7. What kind of illness may permit a boy to stay away 

from school, even though he is not sick himself?. . . . 

8. What condition in a pupil would justify his non- 

attendance ? 15 



SPEED IN SILENT READING 

The value of measuring speed in silent reading should 
be emphasized. It has been found that the children who 
read rapidly — though not always the most rapidly — get the 
meaning much better than the slow pupils ;7the_poorest 
readers in the class are almost without exception the 
slowest. This may be merely another way of saying that 
those of quick and superior natural intelligence are also 
those who have learned the best and most economical meth- 
ods of comprehending what they read. But it is easy to 
prove in any schoolroom that merely helping a pupil in- 
crease his reading pace definitely improves his understand- 
ing. Methods of dealing with this problem will come in for 
discussion later. 16 The small child has great difficulty 
simply in focusing on the lines; his eyes jump here and 
there, so that he constantly loses his place or has to trace 
back and forth with his finger. Often he makes all the 
movements of the word-sounds with his lips and vocal 
chords. Moreover, he goes halting word by word, pausing 
many times, going back and then on again. Interesting 
diagrams of this sort of movement are shown, for ex- 
ample, in Dr. Judd's Reading, its Nature and Develop- 
ment. 17 Of course this method is very much slower than 
sweeping the eyes over many words at once, making only 
three or four pauses to each line of print like this one. 

15 Reproduced by courtesy of Dr. E. L. Thorndike. 
18 Below, pp. 169, ff. 

17 C. H. Judd : Supplementary Educational Monograph 1 :, Vol. ii, 
No. 4 — The University of Chicago Press, 1918. 



TESTING OF READING 149 

2. INTERPRETING AND USING THE RESULTS OF TESTS 

One who has tried such tests in his own schoolroom 
can probably tell what they do and do not reveal about ac- 
tual reading difficulties and possible lines of effort in over- 
coming these. But we are entering upon a period of pos- 
sibly perilous overemphasis on measurements; too many 
makers and administrators of tests, skilled in mathematics, 
but often ignorant of actual children and without schol- 
arly knowledge of school subjects, attempt to interpret 
absolutely the findings of even a single test. One of the 
most enlightened and ardent devisers of tests, Mr. S. A. 
Courtis, gives sensible warning against this misinterpreta- 
tion. 18 He notes that "The factors which determine 
scores are so many that the slightest change in the test it- 
self, in the children taking the test, or in the conditions 
under which it is given, may result in very different 
scores/ ' He notes further that "if standard tests are used 
to magnify results above children great harm will 
be done." 

In other words, scales and tests like these are not sup- 
posed, by anybody who has used and studied them prop- 
erly, to be final and perfect products ; they do not of course 
measure with anything like ideal accuracy. 19 They are, 
however, an enormous improvement on the rough guesses 
that teachers have often been forced to make, and so help 
to do pupils more reasonable justice than heretofore. 
They are so far as possible devised as real situations ; that 
is, they contain matter worth reading — at least as worth 
while as school texts — and provide the stimulus of 
matching wits against a reasonable problem to bring out 

18 In a pamphlet of " General Information," published by the 
Bureau of Courtis Standard Research, Detroit, 1920. 

18 E. L. Thorndike : " Reliability and Significance of Tests of 
General Intelligence," Journal of Educational Psychology, May-June, 
1920. (11:284) : a discussion of the probable error of measurement 
by a single test. 



ISO READING AND LITERATURE 

the best a child can accomplish. But it is impossible that 
any situation, however real, should move every child to 
his best work, or even to a good average performance, on 
any given day. To rate a pupil from tests alone — and 
particularly from only one testing — without careful obser- 
vation from week to week of his responses to various 
reading matter, is unlikely to be fair. For comparing 
entire classes the tests are of course more exact measures. 
But checking one's observation with tests carefully given, 
and revising estimates from the tests by means of further 
careful study of individuals, will give us the most prob- 
ably valid information for planning work with them, as 
in the experiment reported in a following section. 20 

It should be clearly emphasized that tests are not de- 
signed for daily class use, but as checks and measurements 
to be applied perhaps once a term or once or twice during 
the school year. 

A helpful suggestion from the scientific measurers is 
that we show pupils graphically and clearly where they 
are and how far they have come and have to go. For ex- 
ample, charts of speed in reading showing initial posi- 
tion and gain by month or term, or gain in comprehension 
ability between tests a term or a year apart, are a remark- 
able stimulus to good-spirited and sustained effort. So 
far as possible these should avoid emphasis on com- 
parisons between individuals in the class. Because chil- 
dren differ immensely in natural powers and keep pretty 
much the same relative positions throughout — that is, are 
from beginning to end poor, mediocre, or superior — 
priggishness on the one hand, sore misery on the other, 
are apt to be the chief results where competition of indi- 
viduals is taken earnestly. But where a child competes 
against the median or average score of ten thousand pupils 
of his age or in the same school grade, there is less invidi- 
" 20 Pp. 171, it. 



TESTING OF READING 151 

ousness of comparison. Where his effort is spent in im- 
proving his own record and increasing his stride, there 
is room only for good honest trying and deserved satisfac- 
tion. Possibly best of all, a child may work to better the 
score of his grade or school in competition with others ; 
his problem, and his pride thus become social, and there 
is less petty jealousy. I do not of course mean that in- 
dividual rivalries are not sometimes a keen and useful 
stimulus ; but the gains we desire are the greatest possible 
additions to each one's ability, irrespective of any one 
else's; and recent studies have emphasized the fact, often 
overlooked, that differences in ability at birth are not 
leveled out by education, even if such a result were desir- 
able. They tend to grow greater rather than less with 
proper training; for under the most favorable conditions 
the able child often gains more than the inferior, and so 
outdistances him still further. 21 

For the benefit of teachers who wish to use these scales 
with their classes I give below the standards derived by 
the makers of the tests for attainment grade by grade. 
These, in Dr. Thorndike' s words, represent "achievements 
a little above those actually made in schools under the pos- 
sibly disturbing conditions of testing by an outsider." 

SUGGESTED STANDARDS IN COMPREHENSION 

Courtis Silent Reading Thorndike Scale 
Test No. 2 Alpha 2 

Grade 2 59 

Grade 3 78 

Grade 4 89 5.25 s2 

Grade 5 93 575 

Grade 6 95 650 

Grade 7 7- 

Grade 8 750 

21 E. L. Thorndike : Educational Psychology, v. ii, pp. 159-61 ; 
Briefer Course, pp. 390-2. 

22 See specimen of this rank, p. 146. 



152 READING AND LITERATURE 

High School, First Year 23 7.75 ^ 

Second Year 23 8 

Third Year 23 g #25 

Fourth Year 23 8.50 

For rate in silent reading, in words per minute, 
the following standards derived by Mr. S. A. Courtis 24 
are given in comparison with those of Dr. Brown, 
earlier published. 25 

RATES OF SILENT READING 

S. A. Courtis, 1920 H. A. Brown, 1916 

Grade 2 84 

Grade 3 113 199.2 

Grade 4 145 213 

Grade 5 168 269.4 

Grade 6 191 272.4 

Grade 7 279 

Grade 8 284.4 

Adult Rate 26 320 (rapid reading) 

200 (careful reading) 

It is to be noted that Mr. Courtis' later figures, based on 
many more cases, indicate a lower rate than Dr. Brown's, 
and than his own earlier estimates. 

Thus, by the use of standardized tests both teacher 
and pupils can discover how the class and each individual 
in it rank in comparison with standards set after testing 
thousands of children with the same materials. Upon the 
basis of this information it is possible to plan work 

23 "Only provisional estimates" (Dr. Thorndike's note). 

24 Published by his Research Bureau, Detroit, 1920. 

25 H. A. Brown : Measurement of the Ability to Read : New Hamp- 
shire Department of Public Instruction, 191 6. 

29 Quoted in W. S. Gray : Studies of Elementary-School Reading 
through Standardised Tests. 



TESTING OF READING 



i53 



definitely to help each sort of pupils: those whose rate of 
reading is abnormally low, those who signally fail to com- 
prehend what they read, and those who are approximately 
normal and who are superior in these respects. 

We have now seen ( 1 ) how children's individual pow- 
ers and difficulties in reading, particularly in comprehension 
of silent reading, may be discovered by careful testing; 
and (2) in what fashion information furnished by the 
tests, and the tests themselves, may be useful in planning 
objectives and ordering moves to reach them. It remains 
to consider specifically what methods teachers have em- 



s. 



f^ ii' V "' ^ 



Plate I — Surface of frequency showing the distribution in the case of rate of reading 

in a fourth grade of 54 pupils. This is an example of a fairly satisfactory distribution. 

Dr. H. A. Brown's Measurement of Ability to Read, By permission of the author. 



154 



READING AND LITERATURE 



ployed in order to overcome difficulties and increase 
abilities in this fundamental activity. 



81 


























7 « 
















Of 






















S B 






















4< 














— 










.3 < 

1 < 
























f 


» 












f I 


' 1 







5 Id -15 30 25 30 3J 40 45 SO 55 6o 65 70 75 



90 95 I0Q 



Plate II — Surface of frequency representing the distribution of comprehension of the 
same pupils as in Plate I. This is an example of a very unsatisfactory condition. 
There are five modes. The group is not a compact one as regards comprehension. 
From Dr. H. A. Brown's Measurement of Ability to Read. By permission of author. 



TESTING OF READING 





VII 



VIII 



III IV 

Plate III — Curve representing the growth in comprehension from third to eighth 
grade inclusive. This curve was drawn by taking the highest third grade found thus 
far, the highest fourth, and so on. 

The figures at the left represent the grade average in Dr. Brown's test. "It may be 
taken as a tentative standard for this particular reading test." From Dr. H. A. 
Brown's Measurement of A bility to Read. By permission of the author. 



156 READING AND LITERATURE 

B. CONVENTIONAL METHODS IN TEACHING READING 

First of all, let us examine and attempt to evaluate the 
methods which have been most commonly employed in 
teaching reading. Three sorts of procedure, in all propor- 
tions and combinations, have been characteristically used : 

i. Full and complete courses in formal gram- 
mar to aid in the understanding of syntax 

2. Extensive vocabulary studies and dic- 
tionary drills, often including memorization of 
prefixes and suffixes and of lists of words and 
meanings, to be used in a following reading les- 
son or at some more remote period 

3. Tests of memory of what has been read — 
usually directed upon the most unobtrusive de- 
tails as the surest indication of careful study 

Now, if we can credit the evidence both of the com- 
prehension tests and of the complaints of high-school and 
college teachers in all departments, comprehension has not 
followed satis fyingly upon these often elaborate and 
rigidly difficult sorts of drill. We shall therefore examine 
each in turn and try to discover what real essentials, what 
possibly worthless and actually obstructive matters, are 
included in it. In the teaching of reading or any other sub- 
ject we are often driven, by whatever conscience enlightens 
or darkens our work, toward a rigorous over-insistence 
on petty detail for the sake of assumed gains in power. 
On the other hand, a radical spirit freely current now- 
adays moves us the opposite way, toward a sometimes 
vaporous and hectic concern with only general issues and 
fundamental emotions in literature. 

I. SENTENCE GRAMMAR 

We may consider first the use of grammar and its 
possible abuse in the teaching of comprehension. No- 



TESTING OF READING 157 

body, I think, seriously and sensibly questions that certain 
fundamentals of grammar are quite essential to the com- 
prehension of sentences. Clearly one must discover (1) 
the subject and the verb in any statement he would 
comprehend — what is talked about and what is asserted of 
it — whether or not he uses these terms. One needs to 
know, also (2) what modifies what — to trace modifiers 
directly and surely to what they limit or describe. Finally 
it is shown by the tests themselves that we need to master 
the precise force of (3) certain linking or relational words 
— the meaning, for instance, of but in "I don't know but 
I will," of except in "All except Will," and of even if 
and though, as if, unless, and nevertheless. But this last 
topic (3) is more a matter of word study than of grammar. 

To the extent that a pupil is sure of these elemental 
points of syntax he is, I think, fully equipped for most of 
the battles of comprehension for which an elaborate armor 
is usually provided. Of course we are not here consider- 
ing anything beyond the grammar of reading — not that 
of composition. 27 But it is difficult to find justification 
in the teaching of reading for any further topics. 

It is to be clearly understood, however, that no easy 

dodging of difficulties is here recommended. Growth in 

power, whether of understanding what one reads or of 

expressing thoughts well in simple form, does not come 

by lucky accident and in unconsciousness, but by hard 

work. A real mastery of the handful of grammar topics 

here recommended, for example, is a matter of years of 

constant recurrence and faithful effort, and not merely of 

a few lessons on each. This point is particularly important 

to urge in any consideration of fundamentals. Indeed, 

the principal argument for abolishing the complexities of 

27 The whole topic of grammar essentials is discussed in the 
Report^ of the Grammar Subcommittee, Committee on Economy of 
Time in English Teaching of the National Council of Teachers of 
English; English Journal, viii— 179 (March, 1919). 



1 58 READING AND LITERATURE 

the usual study of grammar is that with scattered atten- 
tion upon many points the fundamentals never get ade- 
quately taught; everything is attacked, but nothing mas- 
tered. Whether for comprehension or for composition, 
or for the necessarily greater complexities of grammar 
in foreign languages studied later, a program of a few 
essentials really grounded in the understanding and made 
useful in practice is to be recommended as the one practi- 
cable and sure method of approach. 

2. WORD STUDY 

A teacher who has discovered his pupils' pitiful pau- 
city of vocabulary is often moved to begin at once de- 
liberate attempts to add a few words at a time, much as 
coal is shovelled into a bin. But, as the Roman Quin- 
tilian, himself a successful teacher, long ago put it, atten- 
tion to synonyms and vocabulary building leads chiefly to 
a "circulatory" or "circumlocutory vocabulary" (ar- 
culatoria volubilitas) . 2S It has just as unfortunate effects 
in diverting attention from the real end and aim of read- 
ing and of the teaching of reading. Indeed, much that has 
gone under the name of word study has probably been 
quite futile and even harmful. But of course a reason- 
able method of mastering word-meanings is essential to 
comprehension. We must steer some sort of course be- 
tween hazy and lazy guessing where specific knowledge is 
essential, and meticulous, petty insistence on irrelevant 
detail and unin forming definition. 

Besides recourse to a dictionary there are two other 
methods of finding the meaning of words. The first is 
through knowing their derivations, as when we find what 
dissent means from knowing dis and sentire, or discover 
the meaning of Sault Ste. Marie from knowing the 
French words directly, or from associating the first with 

iS Quintilian : Institutions OratoriaeXn 'De Copia Verborum,' 
Par. 8. 



TESTING OF READING 159 

somersault and assault and insult and result and others of 
that interesting group. Systematic examination of word 
structure — of commonly necessary prefixes and suffixes 
and roots to assist in clearing the meaning of new words — ■ 
in and anti, ly, sist, and sta and the like — is of good but 
limited value. The bulk of lessons of this sort, if I may 
judge by my experience, do not actually serve much pur- 
pose and are not remembered. Study needs to be made, 
like that which has proved so useful upon spelling lists, 
to determine a few essential points here and so emphasize 
them that they will be really established. 29 It is probably 
a waste of time to go far into this study of etymology. 
And this is a peculiarly dangerous region of guesswork; 
as the wrecks of countless false etymologies in the dic- 
tionaries show, resemblances in spelling by no means 
prove kinship in meaning. 

Many pleasant lessons can indeed be spent in looking 
up the surprising histories of words like stimulus, deliri- 
ous, enthusiast, tawdry, disaster, influenza. Words and 
their Ways in English Speech by Greenough and Kittredge 
is full of such matters, as are all histories of the language ; 
the teacher will find the subject most interesting to himself, 
and in some measure to his classes. It will furnish at 
least a pleasant acquaintance with words outside the small 
and niggardly lot that the pupil actually understands and 
uses. More of this than we usually give is needed now- 
adays for the majority who will have no word of Latin 
or Greek ; we must show them in this way the contributions 
of these languages to English, as we have always had to 
give that of Anglo-Saxon. But we do not find in the 
study of etymology more than a small and incidental con- 
tribution to our problem of comprehension. 

29 This, with some etymology and language-history, is attempted in 
a course in General Language by Riah Fagan Cox and Sterling A. 
I Leonard, as yet unpublished. 



160 READING AND LITERATURE 

2. THE USE OF THE DICTIONARY 

It is of course essential that every child learn to use 
the dictionary quickly and intelligently. He should have a 
dictionary of his own, not of the exasperatingly small and 
inadequate sort, but at the least of the Webster Academic 
or Student's Standard size. And he should be given prac- 
tice in looking up words with the fewest possible waste 
movements, with the help of the key words at the top of 
each page and of a sure alphabetical sense. This skill can 
be furthered by speed drills with criticisms of individuals' 
methods and with note and charting of gains. It is of 
course necessary for pupils to learn that the same word 
may have various meanings, so that the sense that best fits 
the purpose may be chosen. Such intelligent use of dic- 
tionaries should, I believe, be developed pretty fully in the 
fifth and sixth grades ; but where it is lacking, teachers in 
junior and even senior high school may profitably set to 
work to secure it. 

The dictionary and its use must, however, be consid- 
ered with decided qualifications. We have let its 
undoubted value for learning the spelling and pronuncia- 
tion of words blind us to its deficiencies as an aid in com- 
prehension. In schools that I have observed, its use is more 
often an unintelligent and wasteful practice than a fruitful 
one. It is frequently supposed that the dictionary defini- 
tion is enlightening, where really it is often nothing of 
the sort. Mr. Kerfoot in an especially clever chapter 
discusses this point at some length. 30 The understanding 
of a definition is just as dependent on experience as is 
comprehension of the word itself, and sometimes on more 
specialized and rare experience. For example, imagine 
a boy — or yourself, unless you are a botanist — trying to 

80 J. B. Kerfoot: How to Read, Ch. II: "Muckraking the 
Dictionary.'' 



TESTING OF READING 161 

get any sense of a primrose from the dictionary definition ! 
Indeed, except where a synonym is given that we already 
know or where the word denned is used in a compre- 
hensible sentence — where we are aided, again, by the con- 
text — it is not often that the definition contributes greatly 
to our pupil's realization. And yet the practice is com- 
mon enough of requiring repetition of dictionary or glos- 
sary definitions as a test of comprehension. 

This is to ignore the essential point about compre- 
hension made in Mr. Ker foot's chapter and confirmed 
by Dr. Thorndike's scientific study. Only as we know 
the meaning of a word in relation to every other word 
about it, in its sense in that particular sentence, do we 
understand it. " Words, in themselves — words, that is to 
say, without context — do not possess definite meanings. 
They merely stand for generalized ideas . . . We 
get the meanings of words, as actually used, from 
the context." 31 

This is so important for the teaching of comprehen- 
sion that we will do well to examine it more fully. Sup- 
pose we turn back to the replies to questions about school 
attendance in Franklin; 32 to the question "What is the 
topic of this paragraph?" more than fifteen per cent of the 
children tested answered in some such way as this : 

A group of sentences. 

Indent one-half inch. 

An inch and a half to the right. 

Begin with a capital and end with a period. 33 

What explains this? Simply that drill on the idea para- 
graph in composition writing has made them respond to 
the word in only one way; they had no idea of its mean- 
ing in the question they had to anszver. 

81 Op. cit., pp. 81-3. 

32 Pp. 142 ff. 

33 " Reading as Reasoning," cited above, pp. 324-5. 



i6 2 READING AND LITERATURE 

This of course is the reason why definitions alone are 
of little value and why recognition of the meaning in con- 
text is of paramount importance: The essential thing is 
finding out the meaning of the words used, not in general, 
but in that place; we must try one meaning and then, 
finding it does not fit, alter it to suit. We have, in Dr. 
Thorndike's words, to " treat [the ideas produced by the 
reading] as provisional, and so to inspect, welcome, and 
reject them as they appear." 34 That is, we learn the mean- 
ing as we go along, and as we learn it we have to see that 
every word fits into the scheme. Professor McCall, of 
Teachers College, Columbia University, once told me of 
his experience with the line : 

" I see thee pine like her in olden story." 

Several years after reading this at school, while walking 
in a pine wood he suddenly realized that he had always 
read the line " I see thee, pine," and pictured a tree! So 
soon as a teacher realizes what strange things are certainly 
going on behind the forehead of many a pupil as he reads, 
in spite of careful use of the dictionary, and that it is 
every teacher's duty to find these out and help set the 
crooked straight, he is in a position to be of real assistance. 
It is through context that we learn the meaning of 
many words for the first time. When we see " the nadir 
of his fortunes " contrasted with their zenith, we realize 
that the word must mean lowest point ; it is an additional 
precaution to look it up; perhaps before we try using it 
we had better ; but for clear understanding we hardly need 
to. I remember discovering two new words early in my 
first reading of Ivanhoe, when I was about ten ; they were 
dais and truncheon. I recall distinctly an uneasy sense that 
I ought to look them up ; but my superior interest in the 
story, which I was so vividly picturing as I went on that it 

34 Op. cit. p. 330. 



TESTING OF READING 163 

seemed like an acted drama, kept me at that instead : Now, 
without knowing the meaning of dais I should not have 
seen the hall of Cedric the Saxon as Scott pictures it; but 
the word is clearly explained in the context. Truncheon 
I might have looked up; but it is of no significance; it was 
as I realized, merely some kind of stick. Other and im- 
portant words, however, must be sought out, if one does 
not know them, or else the sense of the passage is lost; 
the word 'pine, in the passage quoted above, is an illustra- 
tion. If I had been early helped to make this sort of dis- 
tinction, I should have been able to form more intelligent 
habits in reading. Instead, I at one time read, with pain- 
ful conscientiousness, all sorts of notes and references 
and pored on glossaries, so that I quite ruined my enjoy- 
ment of the swift movement in The Lady of the Lake; 
and at another time I skipped in slovenly fashion over es- 
sential matters. Realization of the need of balancing 
these extremes — a balance never to be fully achieved, but 
always tried for — is surely very necessary for our pupils. 
We shall recur to this question in our discussion of study- 
ing literature. 35 In fine, we need to teach children to 
guess intelligently at word meanings by observing their 
use in sentences and paragraphs — which means, above all, 
to try, test, and refit until they get the sense of passages 
in text or literature. 

Obviously our own adjustments of meanings of words 
to their context are exceedingly swift and supple; we read 
a great many words a minute ; we cannot stop and define 
each and then redefine it. And yet we do accomplish 
something very like that consciously when we first read 
such a word as kind in Hamlet's " a little more than kin 
and less than kind," for example. And we do much the 
same thing quickly and unconsciously, as Mr. Kerfoot 

■ Chapter VII. 



1 64 READING AND LITERATURE 

shows, 36 with even such an everyday word as fire in 
various associations. 

3. MEMORIZING FACTS AND DETAILS 

It is quite clear that power of memory has many uses 
and that in numerous school situations full and accurate 
memorization of facts and even of words may be profit- 
ably required. It should be no less clear that mem- 
orizing any given details or words has no necessary 
relation whatever with understanding them. Yet, as we 
have noted, memory has constantly been cultivated and 
tested in place of comprehension. Tests have been im- 
memorially administered with books closed, and the 
typical literature question, like that in spelling, has been 
of accurate recall, not of grasp of meaning. Probably 
teachers have feared that random guessing and inaccuracy 
of thought would result from any deviation from require- 
ments of remembering details, whether of definitions or 
of details read. 

So far we have been considering chiefly negative coun- 
sels. A great part of our schoolroom reliance on elaborate 
technical grammar, our invariable and constant recourse 
to the dictionary and reciting of definitions and notes, 
and our memorization of facts and details should be aban- 
doned, as contributing no proportionate and essential gain 
to understanding what one reads. But it should be noted 
that the few essentials of grammar and dictionary use 
and the really contributory work in memorizing essential 
details are not to be slighted or evaded. Indeed, it is 
precisely because we want essentials well and effectively 
taught that we need most to insist on minimum essentials. 

With the equipment provided by the reading scales, we 
are able to test any proposed procedure in teaching reading 
and discover its actual use and value. By centering on 
comprehension, and on rate as clearly contributory to that, 
we can now hope to evaluate the best practice. 

38 Op. Cit., pp. 29, ff. 



CHAPTER VI 

PRINCIPLES OF EFFICIENT METHOD IN THE 
TEACHING OF READING 

A. ESSENTIAL CHARACTERISTICS OF INTELLIGENT READING 

The direct teaching of intelligent reading must 
probably come by a procedure quite different from any 
that we have so far considered. Real help in comprehen- 
sion, v/e shall propose, and the insuring of every demand 
of accuracy and of mastery, are to be secured best 
through precisely the same procedure as that of the com- 
prehension tests themselves. It is certainly clear from 
the evidence so far presented that we need, much more 
than we have done, to test what is read by questions on 
meaning, by directions to be followed, or by reproduc- 
tion, in order to see that the words in their association in 
the text do give our pupils the real experience that is pre- 
sented. Not only may a word have the wrong meaning, 
but that wrong meaning may be so powerful that it blots 
out the meaning of qualifying words or of all the context, 
as with those children who thought the topic of the school- 
attendance paragraph 1 was " Franklin " or " Franklin 
goes to school." Or a word may be so feeble in the pupil's 
understanding as to vanish altogether, as happened with a 
large proportion of the children to except in "All except 
Will had red hair." This "over-or under-potency of any 
element" may cause complete misunderstanding — may 
make right understanding wholly impossible. Only by 
"treating the ideas produced by the reading as provisional, 
and so inspecting and welcoming or rejecting them" can 
intelligent reading be done. 

*P. 142. " " ' 

16S 



166 READING AND LITERATURE 

Dr. Thorndike illustrates as follows a poor and meager 
and a good reading of the following paragraph / of his 
comprehension tests : 

" Nearly fifteen thousand of the city's work- 
ers joined in the parade on September seventh, 
and passed before the two hundred thousand 
cheering spectators. There were workers of 
both sexes in the parade, though the men far out- 
numbered the women. 

"One may read paragraph / with something like the 
following judgments : 

" Fifteen thousand did something — there was 
a parade — September seventh was the day — 
there were two hundred thousand something — 
there was cheering — workers were in the parade 
— both sexes in the parade — the men outnum- 
bered the women. 

" Contrast these with the following which may be in 
the mind of the expert reader: 

" Nearly fifteen thousand — not quite, but 
nearly — of the city's workers — people who 
worked for a living — joined in the parade — a big 
parade of nearly 15,000 — on September seventh 
— the parade was in the fall — they passed before 
200,000 cheering spectators — 200,000 saw the pa- 
rade — they cheered it — there were workers of 
both sexes— there were men workers and women 
workers in the parade — the men far outnum- 
bered the women — many more men than women 
were in the parade." 2 

As Dr. Thorndike well remarks, reading a paragraph 
of explanation or argument in a text and, though to a 

2 E. L. Thorndike : "Reading as Reasoning," Journal of Educa- 
tional Psychology 8: 330-1. 



EFFICIENT METHOD 167 

less degree, reading a narrative or description, is "not 
.... a mechanical, passive, undiscriminating task, 
on a totally different level from the task of evaluating or 
using what is read. [It] involves the same sort of organ- 
ization and analytic action of ideas as occur in thinking 
of supposedly higher sorts." We have noted that rapid 
readers are in general the best also in comprehension ; this 
enforces the point that with the good student reading is no 
slow and painful drudgery, but a supple and swift play of 
mind. The poor reader, however, though he goes more 
slowly, "raises only a few of the problems that should be 
raised and makes only a few of the judgments which he 
should make." 3 

If these considerations have shown something of the 
complexity of the process of understanding what is read 
and a little of the procedure by which the problem can be 
measurably solved, it will have served a genuine purpose. 
Dr. Thorndike makes very clear in his writings on 
this subject what a " blind " and mysterious activity 
silent reading is. We have seen that the child who tries 
to get some part of sense out of words on a page comes 
out with the most seemingly impossible results. Ap- 
parently clear and easy matters — the meaning of except 
in the phrase "all except Will," and the meaning of if and 
though — altogether floor him or shiftily elude his attention, 
so that he quite fails to comprehend statements apparently 
unequivocal. To reinforce this point you have but to 
recollect the similar results you have doubtless got from 
giving children what you consider the plainest directions. 
Perhaps what you have charged to heedlessness and de- 
liberate stupidity has its roots deeper in a lack of essential 
equipment for understanding sentences./ It is to such 
matters that the comprehension tests direct attention 
most emphatically. 

3 "Reading as Reasoning" (cited above), p. 331. 



168 READING AND LITERATURE 

A SPECIFIC ANALYSIS OF THE PROBLEM OF COMPREHENSION 

Our next contribution to a specific analysis of this 
problem is made in an able article by Professor Lyman, 
of Chicago University. 4 The author proposes a course of 
study in reading in the seventh grade, designed for 
securing precisely the results we have been urging as 
essential. The characteristics of a skilful reader, he sug- 
gests, are as follows : He 

1. Reads with definite purpose, a problem in mind 

2. Grasps the author's point of view or central theme 

3. Lays hold on the order and arrangement of the 

author's ideas 

4. Pauses occasionally for summarizing and 

repeating 
5 Constantly asks questions of his reading 

6. Continually supplements from his mental stock 

7. Evaluates the worth of what he reads 

8. Varies the rate of his progress through the 

reading, and 

9. Ties up what he reads with problems of his own 5 

Professor Lyman makes clear in every point of this 
inventory that good reading is not " principally or solely 
a receptive process," but is active, personal, and con- 
structive, and he identifies it with efficient study. His 
entire discussion is of great value to every teacher. In 
the remainder of this chapter we shall examine various 
ways of developing skill in such reading as is here 
described, approaching the problem with regard to dif- 
ferent purposes or difficulties which actuate practical read- 
ing for comprehension, or study. 

4 R, L. Lyman : "The Teaching of Assimilative Reading in the 
Junior High School" — School Review, October, 1920 (28:600). 
Op. cit., p. 603. 



EFFICIENT METHOD 169 

B. WHAT THE TEACHING OF EFFICIENT READING ENTAILS 

We need to discover just what help is needed to develop 
power in this most central and essential ability, intelligent 
reading, and how to apply that help. Certainly the con- 
clusion is inescapable that something different from the 
usual procedures of analyzing grammatical structure, 
looking up definitions of words, and memorizing are 
essential to full comprehension of texts and other reading. 
Moreover, it is frequently true in teaching based on too 
narrow a view that difficulties are created or intensified by 
formal drill which would never appear, or would right 
themselves, under more normal conditions. This of 
course is no condemnation of drills ; it merely states a more 
than occasional misdirection of them. 

GETTING SPEED IN SILENT READING 

For example, there is the matter of eye movement in 
reading, already referred to. We know that proper habits 
must be taught, in order to secure not alone skill, but 
understanding of what is read. Dr. W. S. Monroe is 
of the opinion that, by conservative estimate, the average 
speed of pupils' reading can be easily increased by 25 
per cent through use of the proper teaching measures. 
The huge gains that this would make possible in accom- 
plishment, accompanied as it has been found to be by 
similar gains in comprehension, need no emphasis. 

In order to secure these gains, teachers have frequently 
resorted to such devices as flash-cards with phrases on 
them to secure reading of larger units than single words 
at a time. And indeed, if the necessary increase of 
pace in reading is not secured at the proper time, the 
lack may perhaps have to be so remedied later. The best 
accounts of specific methods for developing such speed, 
and of the highly significant results which can be secured 



i 7 o READING AND LITERATURE 

in this way, are to be found in the recent studies by 
Dr. O'Brien. 6 

The best results can clearly be secured by begin- 
ning earlier to secure an efficient pace in reading. Good 
teaching in primary grades nowadays helps children, from 
their very first attempts, to recognize at a glance as many 
phrases and common word-groups as possible. More- 
over, as Dr.W. S. Gray has pointed out, in the intermediate 
grades — the fourth through the sixth — this pace is most 
definitely fixed ; after that a bad habit of slowness is more 
difficult to break. 7 But the mere provision in these grades 
of an abundance of reading matter is actually found to 
do all that is necessary for most children in forming 
essential right habits of eye-sweep and of reading without 
lip-movement. This has been noted in libraries where chil- 
dren come who have not been used to having books. The 
enjoyable reading matter of itself works its own effect 
without any conscious attention from teacher or pupils. 8 

Of course such abundance of reading matter must in 
any grade be adapted to the individual pupil's power as 
well as his interests if it is to have the desired effect. We 
find, for instance, in ninth grade, pupils whose interest 
is still in the wildest improbabilities of fairy tales, and 
others whose reading pace and power is still that of the 
fourth-grade child. For such children simple materials 
usually read in the lower grades are suitable, until increas- 
ing power and maturity bring them nearer to the usual 
choices of books for their grade. 

"J. A. O'Brien Silent Reading, Macmillan, 1920. Also sum- 
marized in the Twentieth Yearbook of the National Society for the 
Study of Education, Part II, 1921. 

7 W. S. Gray : Relation of Silent Reading to Economy in Edu- 
cation: XVI Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of 
Education, 191 7, Part 1, pp. 26-7. 

8 1 am indebted to Professor T. H. Briggs of Teachers College, 
Columbia University, for calling attention to this point. 



EFFICIENT METHOD 171 



A most useful article by Miss Laura Zirbes is sugges- 
tive of sensible use of the results of tests. 9 The writer 
divided her fourth-grade classes on the basis of their speed 
in silent reading as determined by Dr. W. S. Gray's 
tests. To each of three groups separated on this basis, 
Miss Zirbes gave assignments fitted as closely as possible to 
individual abilities. The intelligent and rapid readers 
were for the most part free to read as they liked, and were 
required to do a minimum of specific reporting. The 
middle group were restricted in their choices and held to 
more careful accounting of their understanding of what 
they read. The slowest pupils had to give so much time 
to individual and group instruction in the technique of 
comprehension that they had less time than the rest for 
free reading, although much effort was apparently made 
to provide for them also real incentive and interest in ex- 
cellent reading. Each month the groups were shifted ac- 
cording to performance in informal tests. The result was 
that all but two of the class reached the middle group by 
May of that school year, and all but five the highest group. 
The increase in amount of their individual reading was 
also marked, as may be seen by the fact that their average 
of pages of silent reading during school hours increased 
from sixty in October and November to over three hun- 
dred in February and March. 10 

9 Laura K. Zirbes : Diagnostic Measurements as a Basis of Proced- 
ure : Elementary School Journal, xviii, 505. 

10 Miss Zirbes' classification was made on the basis of speed only, 
because it is most easily measured and most clearly visible as a fair 
measure to the pupils ; because the slow readers are almost invariably 
as we have seen, inferior in understanding what they read; and 
because in the fourth grade speed is probably the major objective. 
In later school years classification by both speed and comprehension 
is probably most desirable. The assumption was made here, based on 
Dr. Gray's studies, that an oral reading rate of 80 words and a silent 
rate of 120 words a minute are necessary for enjoyable and under- 
standing reading. 



1 72 READING AND LITERATURE 

Experiments similar to this have been tried in various 
places with similar excellent results. 11 And these results 
can be improved as we learn more of effective procedure 
in dealing with individual needs and difficulties in silent 
reading. Any teacher can convince himself of the neces- 
sity of such diagnosis and classification, and of the actual 
impossibility of working to any effect with the same as- 
signments and drills for all grades of ability, by a 
single careful experiment with a class under ordinary 
school conditions. 

VARIETIES OF PURPOSE IN READING 

The purposes which actually and genuinely bestir 
pupils to read in school are no different in kind from those 
which acuate anybody out of school. It is quite obvious 
that no one has the same purpose in all his reading. Some- 
times he is intent merely on the real and vivid experiences 
of a story and follows it almost breathlessly; again, he 
pauses to consider some action, like Maggie Tulliver's 
return from the boat trip with Stephen. He tries to piece 
out the story from his previous experience and knowledge 
of her character and environment, or to see whether her 
decision is a real resultant of the forces acting; this is a 
type of intelligent reading less common than it is valuable. 
Or at another time one's interest is in the main point of a 
chapter in history or of an essay, and he reads with dis- 
regard of everything that is not essential to his progress 
toward mastering that. For other purposes he may re- 
read a selection with its main point in mind and see how 
the data presented center about that and reinforce it; in 
doing this he constructs a rough sketch-outline of the 
major ideas grouped about the basic interpretation, and 

_ " See especially : English Department, University High School, 
Chicago University : "Differentiating Instruction in Ninth-Grade Eng- 
lish" — School Review, December 1919 (27: 772). 



EFFICIENT METHOD 173 

studies their relative weight. In still another situation he 
looks for specific data to his purpose, and entirely over- 
looks the structure and main idea because these do not 
contribute to that; or he seeks what confirms or contra- 
dicts a view presented somewhere else, hunts out the 
sources of statements, and determines their validity, as 
in comparing the views of British and American his- 
torians on the War of 1812. Again in studying a text- 
book problem he gives minute attention to the conditions 
stated so as to know how to find a solution ; for instance, 
he examines the facts of an early colonization of Virginia 
with a view to discovering why it failed. It is clear that 
his rate of reading, his attention to details, his entire 
mental process must be different in each of these cases. 

For convenience we may group these ways of reading 
according to Bacon's useful division into books for 
tasting, for swallowing, and for chewing and digesting: 
" That is, some bocks are to be read only in parts ; others 
to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read 
wholly, and with diligence and attention." 12 

Before we consider these three types of purpose in 
detail, it is necessary to note that all of them are needed, 
in different degrees and amounts, at every stage of the 
reading process above the primary grades. The teacher in 
every school year must therefore see to providing exercise 
and help in every sort of reading, and must proportion 
his assignments to this end. Upon the high-school teacher 
of English falls the responsibility for seeing to it that 
the necessary technique in each kind of silent reading is 
established, just as he must do for the mechanics of writ- 
ing. He must, like the grade-school teacher, begin precisely 
where his pupils are when he gets them. He can, of 
course, work best in cooperation with his colleagues in 

12 From the essay Of Studies. 



i 7 4 READING AND LITERATURE 

other departments, enlisting their help to insure and hold 
what he establishes. 

I. READING, BUT NOT CURIOUSLY 

We may most conveniently consider first books for 
swallowing or reading "not curiously" — that is, in the old 
sense of the word, not carefully, attentively, minutely. 
This is considered an objectionable and dangerous prac- 
tice by many teachers who believe in " chewing and 
digesting " only. But, you will note, Bacon expressly 
says that " some few " only are to be read " with diligence 
and attention." And is this not true of intelligent reading 
outside of schools? I suppose that the analogy to eating 
here suggested is unfortunate ; teachers are likely to view 
rapid reading with the same distress that parents feel 
toward bolting meals. However that may be, this type of 
reading will be further considered in the next chapter, 
which considers the enjoyment of experience in literature 
— an enjoyment for the most part pursued without con- 
sciously formulated intent or minute analysis. 

2. SELECTIVE READING AND REFERENCE STUDY 

Tasting is a variety of reading also under sharp sus- 
picion of teachers because it is not thorough, word upon 
word, precept upon precept. It consists in skimming, 
selecting, and referring here and there for material essen- 
tial to one's purpose — often for a particular point to sup- 
plement or correct previous knowledge. One may, for 
instance, examine legislative reports and numerous other 
sources to find out whether abolitionists were common 
and expressed themselves freely in Virginia before the 
Civil War; or he may check his first-hand information 
about grain elevators or subways against several accounts 
of them here and there. A slow and literal type of read- 
ing is a peculiarly unfortunate handicap where one wants 



EFFICIENT METHOD 175 

not a single detailed development of a topic, but ideas 
from many sources. The abilities of graduate students 
to do this essential cursory and selective reading are gen- 
erally most limited. Yet it can be developed to consider- 
able power even in junior and senior high-schools. A 
study of this subject at Cornell University in 1914, 13 
among other discoveries and recommendations, urges prac- 
tice specifically in this sort of reading after pupils have 
reasonably mastered the technique of reading and are 
needing to learn its use as a tool of study. Such study 
should be thoroughly attended to in high-school classes in 
English. We shall consider later in this chapter some 
means to this end. 

3. " CHEWING AND DIGESTING/' OR READING IN DETAIL 

We have gone so far in considering various purposes 
in reading, without reference to means of overcoming the 
fundamental difficulties and failures in children's reading 
which we discovered in the findings of tests. 14 This has 
been done deliberately; the mastery of subject matter in 
detail, we have tried to show, is only one of several im- 
portant problems in the teaching of reading. It has un- 
doubtedly been the problem most frequently and urgently 
attacked, if not — when we omit from consideration the 
drill in oral reading — the only one considered in most 
schoolrooms. And, by the showings of the tests, the results 
gained have been most amazingly unsuccessful in a large 
proportion of cases. What are we to infer from these 
findings and what shall we do about it ? 

When detailed study of sentence or paragraph or 
chapter is required in study, it is clearly of no use 

13 Guy M. Whipple and Josephine N. Curtis : ''Preliminary In- 
vestigation of Skimming in Reading" — Journal of Educational Psy- 
chology, 1917 (8: 333-49). 
Above, pp. 140 ff. 



176 READING AND LITERATURE 

for the pupil to go through and memorize the statements 
without any realization or understanding. Yet this is a 
height of almost incredible absurdity from which many 
pupils are not helped down in years of school attendance, 
and this fact alone may account for some of the test 
records. Such a procedure should be followed as will 
secure a sensing of the perceivable details and a mastery 
of the essential point or, in larger units, two or three 
points involved. Real mastery must meet this test: 
Have we in our reading so brought our previous ex- 
perience to bear that we have a clear picture of the sense- 
ible happenings and persons in the account, or lying close 
back of its ideas? Have we pictured to ourselves the 
moving scenes of suffering, in battle or factory or tene- 
ment — scenes of which we have been reading, or which 
lie necessarily back of our attempt to understand the ora- 
tor's or the poet's presentation of courage or of ideals 
of service? Without this actual reconstruction and re- 
alization our study or reading is of little or no effect; 
what we have memorized and unthinkingly agreed with 
will stay but a short time with us, and our mental sweat 
will have streamed in vain. 

GENUINE PURPOSE 

It may seem hardly necessary to repeat here that we 
shall do well to insure genuine purpose for a pupil's 
mastery of details in reading matter or in the technique 
of reading. Whatever the assumed value of the informa- 
tion or the skill, our assumption alone will not carry pupils 
on to its mastery. Yet here, of all places, force- feeding 
and czarist compulsion have most specially thriven. Such 
methods are wasteful and harmful ; they consume energy 
and breed resentments. What Burke says of coercing a 
whole people is equally true of a whole class or majority. 
No effort of imagination on your part is too intense and 



EFFICIENT METHOD 177 

prolonged for seeing this issue and for starting that great 
generator of energy: your pupils' realization of purpose 
and value in the work that has to be done. Once you have 
that, you will not need to spend yourself in devices and 
compulsions, except perhaps for the poorest human 
stuff, or for the better children in their occasional 
demoniac moods. 

As examples of ways in which purpose is secured for 
this sort of work we' need not turn to tricks, games, and 
devices — though these have their legitimate place in 
the primary grades. ( 1 ) We need, of course, subject mat- 
ter that presents problems vividly alive in pupils' everyday 
life and interest, like those in current books in general 
science and mathematics for the junior high-school, as 
contrasted with the old-time " made-up problems." This 
provision of good matter, as we have already noted for 
developing a good pace in reading, often of itself secures 
the result desired ; real problems stir and direct energy to 
master them — arouse questioning and search for answers 
that fit. (2) Where drills are specifically needed — 
as of course they often are for using dictionaries or other 
reference matter or for comprehension of sentences, for 
instance — the stimulus of definite tests in which a pupil 
can see and understand his specific score and can work to 
better it is perKapsTa most powerful as well as an easily 
applied incentive. We have noted that each one can well 
work to make a better individual record as compared with 
the average of several thousand other pupils who have 
been tested. Or he can work with his mates to equal or 
surpass a class or school record. In cases like this pupils 
will not infrequently devise their own drills and impose 
them on unresisting associates who are below standard. 
As they go on they can come to see the larger and more 
far-reaching worth of what they are doing. 

Of course the method of careful study for understand- 

12 



i 7 8 READING AND LITERATURE 

ing what is read, as we have seen, is that of questioning 
and " supplementing from one's own mental stock " illus- 
trated in the contrasted ways of reading quoted from 
Dr. Thorndike. 15 The teaching of such detailed read- 
ing, then, will proceed by calling for new illustrations 
from the pupil's former experience, both in books and 
outside them, quite as often as it will quiz for under- 
standing. Indeed, the former process, of supplementing 
realization by calling on the experience of all a class and 
comparing judgments of worth and validity of state- 
ments, is alone worth much time in classrooms. If we 
want to test comprehension we can do it most effectively 
and quickly by having brief answers written to a half- 
dozen questions. In this way we can in five minutes get 
complete information about every one in a class and have 
the rest of the period free for reading and study and for 
individual conferences with those who show they have 
not mastered what they read. 

" READING IN EVER WIDER UNITS " 16 

We have already suggested what is probably the most 
important point in this study of the teaching of reading : 
developing the ability to get the main point and the organ- 
ization of paragraphs and larger units of expression. 
Most often, in attempting to develop mastery in reading, 
we have behaved as if the task consisted of words and 
sentences only, whereas in reality it most often has to do 
with these only incidentally and on the way. The com- 
monest and most useful business of reading, and thej~eal^ 
test of its success, is a comprehension of the subject mat- 
ter as a whole and in its major divisions. Yet very few 
pupils who have been through school and college seem to 
have grasped this essential idea. Give any group of col- 

15 Above, p. 166. TT~~ 

18 A phrase borrowed from Dr. J. F. Hosic. % - 



EFFICIENT METHOD 179 

lege undergraduates or graduate students, as I have fre- 
quently done, 17 a chapter with definitely unified subject 
matter which is summed up and stated several times in the 
chapter itself, and you will find scarcely fifteen per cent of 
them able to meet your assigned requirement : to state in 
a sentence what the chapter says. The students will give 
you some striking detail or illustration or a quite irrele- 
vant and minor point; most of them cannot strike the 
essential center of the whole. 

But if our teaching of reading does not develop this 
ability, what does it develop? If it concerns itself ex- 
clusively with words and their dictionary meanings, if its 
whole attention moves sentence by sentence, like the aver- 
age theme-reader's blue pencil, and never lifts its eyes to 
a view of the whole, reading has an altogether book- 
worm character, a very short-sighted limitation of pur- 
pose and goal. In considering any well-constructed text 
or essay we study, we need to keep carefully in view the 
necessity of finding the topic or purpose of the whole. 18 
The sixth-grade children in Dr. Thorndike's study who 
failed so lamentably to state the "topic of this para- 
graph " had learned of " paragraph " only as a formal 
definition and as an arbitrarily demanded indentation in 
their own writing; they had never discovered that the 
sentences in interpretive reading, as well as the paragraphs 
themselves, mass to form units all about one topic, which 
they could learn to state. Such study should be a much 
greater part than it has been of the work in history 
and science and in every subject where connected reading 
matter is presented to children. Without it their power 
of reading will hardly be aided in school to become any- 
thing thoroughly useful and important in their daily living. 

17 See English Composition as a Social Problem, p. 88. 
M F. T. Baker: "Study of the Fundamental Idea," in Carpenter, 
Baker and Scott: The Teaching of English, p. 176. 



180 READING AND LITERATURE 

But we must not stop here, either; though this has 
been the goal of much advancement in teaching reading, 
it is only a part-way house to further and continuingly 
more important achievements. For the paragraph is but a 
small unit which in its turn is built into sections, chapters, 
and books. To have mastered it is to know, perhaps, only 
sub-head & in a large scheme; so soon as possible the 
pupil should turn his attention from an apprentice study 
of the paragraph to a journeyman view of whole chapters 
or larger sections of his text. He should learn to use all 
possible aids provided by his author. The chapter and 
section headings — he should read them with the question : 
What is this part likely to tell? What has it to do with 
what we have been considering? By thus anticipating 
and linking-up, the pupil can come to read intelligently 
in large and significant units, and not in words and 
phrases, sentences and paragraphs only. 

He can be helped to make especial use of the preface 
and the table of contents, which in well-built books give 
an analysis of the major and possibly of essential minor 
divisions of the book and show their relations to one 
another. He can consider this before reading the book 
itself, or when passing from section to section, or at the 
end of studying the whole. This sort of work is of 
value also as developing a questioning and weighing 
rather than a mere undiscriminating method of attacking 
the problem of reading. 

Where we are concerned thus with larger units like 
essays or chapters, it is necessary also to discover the 
major supporting details and their relation to the central 
one ; but this will be a consideration of large and important 
matters, and rarely of minute and subordinate points. 
And this study should of course follow, not precede, 
mastery of the main issue. It may in senior high school 
be extended into that difficult assignment, the writing of 



EFFICIENT METHOD 181 

an abstract or outline stating first the summary of the 
whole, and then the three or four major divisions and 
something of the development of each. But such study 
should rarely, if ever, I believe, run to a more detailed and 
complicated analysis than this. Full outlining or briefing 
of, for example, Burke's Speech on Conciliation is a most 
difficult form of "chewing and digesting," and in most 
schools it obscures the plain value, very rarely achieved, 
of getting the one central point of speech or chapter or 
book, with only the main points grouped about this center. 
It should be stated very positively, also, that such analysis 
or outlining as we have considered here is an aid to 
practical comprehension only. It has little or no relation 
to the quite different, constructive processes of composition 
and of appreciative understanding of literature. 

This ability to read larger and larger sections of sub- 
ject matter for their main thought is one of the chief ob- 
jectives in really useful and practical reading, whether in 
school or out. Clearly a pupil can not most intelligently 
center attention on this major point while he is distracted 
and preoccupied with the requirement of looking up all 
words that he does not know or of preparing to answer de- 
tailed memory questions upon it. It should often be made 
clear, then, that a given assignment, whether of a para- 
graph or a chapter or larger unit, is intended solely for 
getting the main thought. „ 

Studying of chapters or sections for this purpose, in- 
deed, should in almost all cases precede any more detailed 
analysis. Then, unless there appears clear reason for 
mastery in detail — and not for mere " busy- work " or 
simply for getting something useless but definite to test 
upon — we will do better to pass on and attack something 
else in the same fashion, and master similarly its main 
point or issue. 



x8a READING AND LITERATURE 

BOOK-EDITING 

A fifth-grade class directed by Miss Lida Lee Tall, 
formerly principal of the Lincoln School elementary de- 
partment, did an interesting piece of simple editing which 
made firm in their minds essential ideas about make-up of 
books. They made out a table of contents for Frances 
Crompton's Friday's Child; dedicated it, quite neatly, 
" To all children born on Friday," and added a pronounc- 
ing glossary of a few words and word-meanings which 
had caused them trouble in their oral reading. Such ex- 
periments on others' work or their own will make clear to 
children what is really useful and what needless in book 
making. Some of the book-notes and reviews pupils 
write 19 can be noted as good introductions to books where 
introduction is needed. And of course the different func- 
tions of the table of contents and the index and the useful- 
ness of various sorts of full and meager indexes can be 
tested in actual problems. 

We can well spend considerable time, too, in calling 
pupils' attention to the aids to intelligent reading in well- 
edited books. It is worth while cultivating the habit of 
searching the preface for a statement of the purpose and 
the precise nature of a book. The different functions of 
the index and the table of contents, and the usefulness of 
full detail and of various type in these places to show 
relative importance of topics, can all be tested in practical 
problems like those in library reference. And the pupil 
can be taught to make the most of every assistance in 
mastering books. We should read and help our pupils to 
read the titles of chapters and the headings of sections 
with the inquiry: What will be found in this division? 
What questions will be answered? What does this cap- 

»Cf. Chapter IX, below. 



EFFICIENT METHOD 183 

tion lead me to expect? We should help them to study 
pictures, and not dismiss them with a glance at their titles. 
We should call upon the book itself to help us, in the pauses 
for summarizing and reflection which characterize an in- 
telligent reader. Well-edited books are provided with a 
lavish array of assistance if we but know how to use it; 
this often includes: 

The preface, stating the purpose of the book, 
and perhaps an introductory chapter giving 
more detail 

The table of contents, displaying the scheme of 
the whole 

Chapter titles, section headings, and number- 
ings or marginal indications of topics or 
divisions of the subject, to help in ordering 
and evaluating 

Pictures and diagrams and their legends 

Illustration by examples and comparisons, to be 
supplemented by specific details from the 
reader's own experience 

Summaries and conclusions, helping the reader 
tie together what he learns and evaluate 
its worth 

Indexes, with detailed indication of relative 
importance of points, often by means of vari- 
ous type. 

Such definite instruction as Professor Lyman urges may 
well provide in detail for making use of all these helps 
in text-books. 20 

THE USE OF REFERENCE BOOKS AND LIBRARIES 

This sort of work needs completing by means of good 
courses in the use of the reference library, given best by a 

20 " Teaching of Assimilative Reading," cited on p. 168, above. 



i8 4 READING AND LITERATURE 

trained teacher-librarian. Such lessons include some ac- 
count of the making of books and their proper care. They 
give real problems, from the work of classes in various 
subjects and from the pupils' outside interests, as in col- 
lecting or hand work, and aid in finding solutions. These 
problems require reference to the library card catolog for 
pictures, books, and pamphlets on a subject, for works by 
a known author, and for a specific book desired. They 
include similar uses of the magazine indexes, the Pub- 
lisher's Index, and such generally useful books of reference 
as almanacs, Books of Days and of Popular Customs, and 
familiar quotations. The value and expeditious use of 
dictionaries and encyclopaedias is of course brought in. 
And the study opens to the children's inquiry such use- 
ful extensions of ideas on their favorite subjects as are 
supplied in available government publications and booklets 
issued by numerous firms, telling about aeroplane instru- 
ments, turtle raising, and what not. A complete and use- 
ful series of chapters on this subject is to be found in The 
Use of Books and Libraries by Fay and Eaton ; 21 it should 
provide ample supply of suggestions to teachers who want 
to organize such courses. Here are some sample ques- 
tions on a course in grades seven to ten, in a test given 
recently by Miss Eaton : 

If you wanted to find a magazine article on the 
gyroscope, how would you go to work? 

(A lecture on the gyroscope had greatly in- 
terested the entire school shortly before.) 
In what reference books would you look to find 

the following: 
Something about Old English Christmas customs? 
(This was shortly before the holidays and 
applied to the Christmas festival.) 
A receipt for making glue ? 
21 Part I, Chapters I-X. Boston, Faxon, 1917. 



EFFICIENT METHOD 185 

Name one or more government documents that 
you have used or seen and tell how to find and 
secure one that would be of use to you. 

If you could have only one scientific or current 
events magazine, which would you choose, 
and why? 

What three questions does the card catalog answer? 

There is a useful section on " Instruction in the Use of 
Books and Libraries " in the report on Standard Library 
Organization and Equipment for Secondary Schools of 
Different Sizes. 22 This proposes a minimum of three les- 
sons a year, in English periods, given by the librarian as 
library instruction; or twelve lessons as a unit course 
based on all the subjects. The suggestions on learning 
about the history of books and the processes of making 
and binding books, and on seeing excellent editions to en- 
courage care in using books, are especially worth empha- 
sizing. The report wisely urges cooperating with the 
public library and initiating pupils into use of its resources. 

This work should include practice in the proper 
taking of notes, with citation of author and title and 
exact source of information. Excellent work in this is 
sometimes, but too infrequently, done in various classes 
in intermediate grades and high schools. Often several 
reference books replace or supplement the single text 
in geography or history, and everybody looks up his 
topic with the use of more than one of these, referring 
throughout to indexes and tables of contents and to 
marginal or other division headings. A pupil can thus 
find out the values of different types of books, in prepara- 
tion for fuller reference study. 

Perhaps most important of all, he can begin, at least, to 

21 Report of Committee on Library Organization and Equipment 
in Journal of the National Education Association, iii, 8 (April, 1919), 
PP- 530-558. See reference, p. 134, above. 



1 86 READING AND LITERATURE 

learn to test and weigh statements instead of blindly ac- 
cepting whatever is printed. When he finds, perhaps in 
an eighth-grade history class, that two books give different 
figures for the drop in prices in Ohio caused by the Erie 
Canal, and when he further discovers, under a teacher's 
expert guidance, that counting the vote of the class or 
making a poll of school texts does not settle such a ques- 
tion, he is ready for an understanding of what historical 
fact means, and for an elementary study of source material 
and its proper uses. Thus, good and thorough teaching 
of reading permeates all departments and all studies and 
makes its significant contribution to a scientific attitude 
of mind in approaching the problems of study. It is, in 
effect, a great part of what is meant by those who urge 
sensible "supervised study." 

THE READING OF PERIODICALS 

A necessary part of teaching comprehension, whether 
in the library or the English periods, is a consideration of 
how to read and how not to read newspapers and maga- 
zines. Poor, unselective, and uninformed straying in 
these weedy pastures is a major waster of time for grown 
people otherwise well educated and intelligent. If we can 
give pupils in grades and high school some orientation 
here, we may be of considerable use. 

A spirited and yet altogether fair and honest attack on 
the newspaper was made by Professor F. N. Scott in an 
address before the National Council of Teachers of 
English some time ago. 23 It was not the newspaper's Eng- 
lish that Professor Scott deplored, but the fact that the 
ideas it presents are too often untrue and unclean. Its 
journalistic distortion and disproportion of facts, while it 
keeps from the blow of the law, its playing-up of the abhor- 

K F. N. Scott: The Undefended Gate: The English Journal, 
January, 1914; III: 1. 



EFFICIENT METHOD 187 

rent and abnormal, and its unwillingness to fairly ac- 
knowledge injustices and errors are its most harmful 
features. A really remarkable confirmation of the points 
Dr. Scott made was furnished immediately by the 
Chicago newspapers. They printed a distorted and mis- 
leading account of his remarks, and one of them based an 
ill-tempered, scathing editorial on the account. Immedi- 
ately on receipt of the actual address, however, there ap- 
peared a full editorial retraction, to the effect that, 
although the editor's opinion of what Professor Scott was 
reported to have said remained unchanged, he found him- 
self in considerable agreement with what had really been 
said. This interesting material is all published, with the 
address itself, in the reference noted above. 

Clearly our pupils' trustful reading of newspaper 
articles and the common acceptance by grown people of 
biased news and ill based editorial opinion needs some 
definite treatment. The unreliability of newspaper stories 
of the Titanic disaster is illustrated in Dr. Scott's 
address. Similar illustrations may be found in num- 
bers by anyone who will compare daily news articles 
with the more considered and accurate reports of 
the same events in weekly and monthly magazines, and 
these again with the historical books that spring up in the 
wake of great happenings, like those of various reporters 
and others who studied the Great War. 24 Such study 
of history in the making is an excellent commentary on 
the daily news ; so is a journalistic account of events pupils 
have themselves seen. ^A series of lessons on the compara- 
tive accuracy and the bias of local and larger newpapers 
is one of our great possibilities of service toward developing 
an intelligent citizenship and such clearness of vision as will 

"For example, Philip Gibbs : Now It Can be Told and More 
That Must be Told (Harper) ; Frederick Palmer, The Folly of the 
Nations (Dodd, Mead, 1921). 



1 88 READING AND LITERATURE 

promote international-mindedness and honorable dealing. 

But no one should attempt this problem in the notion 
that it can be solved summarily and finally. The differ- 
ences of view of careful and intelligent adult readers due 
to temperament and early development of prejudice illus- 
trate its impossibility of solution. It requires long and 
constant attention to make the merest beginning. But we 
can set going in pupils some understanding of elementary 
means for testing facts and sorting them very roughly. 
So we shall come a little nearer to that demand, and conse- 
quent supply, of more vigorous attempts in our newspapers 
to record fact, which Mr. Lippmann rightly insists is the 
fundamental condition to intelligent and measurably suc- 
cessful democracy. 25 

Special attention must be given to sorting-out matters 
of fact and expressions of opinion. Few people are keen 
at detecting the masquerade of unsupported belief as rock- 
ribbed fact, or realize the immense conviction carried by 
a mere assertion. Facts must be run down by comparison 
of various accounts and their reliability; opinions must 
be discovered to be of value in the degree that they are 
based on ample and trustworthy fact and are expressed by 
intelligent, honest, and unprejudiced persons. Pupils can, 
for example, compare the text of a President's message 
with the usually equal bulk of explanation and comment 
on it in the news columns, and with the editorials on that 
and similar subjects in various newspapers. Such an 
analysis can be made highly useful to our young people of 
junior or senior high school age, and in even the inter- 
mediate grades. That many English teachers and their 
colleagues in other departments are taking up this problem 
and working together earnestly upon it promises well for 
a needed rise in the level of democratic intelligence and 

33 Walter Lippmann: Liberty and the News, Harcourt, Brace 
and Company, 1920. 



EFFICIENT METHOD 189 

efficiency. Most men who believe in democracy because 
they have thought about it, and not merely inherited the 
idea, do so because they consider that democracy offers 
the best opportunity and urge for everybody to become 
more widely intelligent about matters of vital concern. By 
teaching intelligent selective reading our schools can do 
much toward fulfilling this opportunity. 

We have mentioned under sources of subject matter 
the possible use of magazines of events and comment, of 
science and various arts, and of vocations, as well as liter- 
ary journals. Help in reading all these with sensible omis- 
sions and in rapid skimming to find the gist of articles is 
a desirable contribution to economical use of time and wits. 
Every problem here is naturally conditioned by the reader's 
actual purpose. Here, as well as in reading newspapers, 
we need knowledge of how to get the essentials of news, 
noting for the most part headlines and opening paragraphs 
and summaries and the first and last sentences of para- 
graphs, and making use of such aids as section headings 
and illustrations with their legends. The teacher of 
English is responsible equally with the teachers of science 
and history for development of these essential powers, 
and he should initiate and help organize all possible co- 
operation in giving assignments and working toward 
really intelligent reading, which is effective study. 

pupils'' own selection of purpose 

Naturally, so soon as pupils are clearly conscious 
of the various sorts of purposes we have noted, they 
should be given good and important reading matter and 
told to find out their own most suitable attack upon it. 
Where they chance on gossipy historical narrative like that 
of Froissart, ©r travel chat like Harry Franck's or Alice 
Tisdale's, they will wisely choose to read it with perception 
of its scenes and its quality, " but not curiously." Where 



i go READING AND LITERATURE 

they are offered material supplementing what they already 
have mastered about Athenian customs or tribal initiations, 
they may well choose to skim it by hasty glancing through, 
or by intelligent use of tables of contents and indexes and 
section headings and of legends on cuts and pictures. 
Where advance material in history or civics or geography 
needs a first attempt at mastery, they will do well to study 
it carefully for its main point only, in disregard of many 
details that may later, in the light of the whole, prove of 
value. But where a problem or an experiment is set in 
mathematics or science, they will see that they must 
" curiously " dig into every detail of it, weigh the condi- 
tions and the procedure proposed, and thoroughly assimi- 
late everything it has to offer before they try to work the 
problem. And so with detailed mastery wherever that 
may be called for; the student who knows how to study, 
as every one who enters the senior high school should 
know in simple, elementary fashion if he is to get the best 
out of the course, must unquestionably be able to discover 
and formulate proper methods of attack in view of his real 
and practical purposes, and then proceed on his own lines. 
And we should then test him, not always by the same 
minute questioning in disregard of what he has actually 
tried to accomplish, but according to the purpose he has 
formulated and tried to carry out: whether by sampling 
his impressions of the narrative lightly read or of the in- 
formation gained by the skimming; by getting a definite 
resume of the main point of essay or chapter and of its 
supports ; or by discovering whether the problem or experi- 
ment was actually done according to the conditions set. 
In all this there is clearly place for exacting a correct 
memory of what is read; but in each case the matters re- 
membered are different; they should always be those 
points necessary to the actual purpose the pupil has adopted. 



EFFICIENT METHOD 191 

THE TEACHING OF ORAL READING 

We have so far spoken of silent reading because that 
has been the least successfully taught and because it is in 
real life the most important kind. We may well wish that 
there were more good oral reading at home in the even- 
ings ; we may do something toward restoring it. But the 
days when only one book was procurable are past, and 
with the necessity, reading aloud has largely stopped. In 
our interested attempts to revive it we must not overlook 
the fact that too much attention to oral reading may be of 
positive harm; for it slows the pace of silent reading by 
confirming in their bad habits those who shape words with 
their lips and vocal chords. With this caution we may con- 
sider briefly the application to the problem of oral reading 
of the principles we have discussed. 

Both speed and comprehension in oral reading may 
well be tested, best by Dr. W. S. Gray's scale already men- 
tioned. 26 Thus our pupils can know their standard in this 
ability also. The test is carefully diagnostic ; yet it is not 
at all clear just how we should regard certain types of 
mistakes noted. For most purposes of oral reading the 
"minor substitutions" carefully recorded in these tests are 
rather meaningless and unimportant as faults — or even are 
virtues, as showing how truly the child gets and expresses 
the idea irrespective of minor verbal forms. But the 
teacher can use the tests and draw his own conclusions. 
They seem, in any case, by no means as important as the 
comprehension tests for silent reading. 

Where it is desired that children read aloud well, it 
seems quite obviously needful to see that they have some 
purpose in doing so. In the primary grades, indeed, the 
mere fun of initiation into a mystery is stimulus and pur- 
pose enough. But in grades at least above the second or 

20 See footnote, p. 144, and list of tests, Appendix I, p. 354. 



1 92 READING AND LITERATURE 

third children can hardly be expected to read aloud well 
when they are merely calling words before a class already 
familiar with the material and with books open before 
them. On the other hand, where a pupil brings in and 
reads to the class something that he understands and 
knows better than the rest, or that is new to most of 
them, there seems reasonable likelihood that he will do far 
better. I have seen this sort of reading beautifully done 
even in first and second grades. 

A college professor says that he once complained of 
poor oral reading in a literature class. A colleague in- 
quired: "Do you, in the midst of an analytical lesson, 
simply ask them to read?" The complainant admitted 
this. " Then/' said his colleague, " how can you expect 
them to read well?" The experiment of asking a student 
to prepare a selection for a best possible reading, to con- 
tribute to the class enjoyment, produced a definite im- 
provement. This point is as valid for the grades and high 
school as for college classes. 

Such real purpose for reading can be secured in 
various ways : one of the very best, the preparation for 
dramatizing and the consequent training in study and 
interpretation of words and of character, will be discussed 
in a later chapter. 27 In fact, reading aloud belongs chiefly 
to the study of literature, rather than to the present 
chapter. Other means are assigning selections to indi- 
viduals or small groups, who prepare each his own part 
to give before the class, and asking or allowing indi- 
viduals to bring in and read whatever they think will be 
of use or pleasure to their classmates, subject to the 
teacher's editorship and to fair limitations of time. It is 
easy to apply this method to the use of various references 



Chapter X, below. 







The Queen of Hearts, 
She Made Some Tarts. 







THE KNAVE OF HEARTS, BY LOUISE SAUNDERS 

AS PRESENTED AT THE WISCONSIN HIGH SCHOOL, DIRECTED BY MISS JEAN HOARD, 
MAY, 1 92 1. 



EFFICIENT METHOD 193 

supplementing or replacing the class text in history and 
geography and the like. 28 

The criticism of oral reading should be centered 
wholly about increasing ability to aid our hearers' pleasant 
comprehension of what is read. If pupils grasp the 
thought or idea definitely, and if they have a genuine 
interest in making that idea clear to their hearers, the 
mechanics of oral reading do not generally cause serious 
difficulty. Mispronunciation of words can be corrected 
incidentally — but one must be sure that these are real mis- 
pronunciations and that the substitute forms are not mere 
personal or sectional predilections. The pupil can be 
helped also, as has been suggested for silent reading, in 
sweeping his eye over considerable sections in a line — 
reading in phrases and not in words only ; thus he will be 
able to look well ahead and group his ideas properly for 
presentation, not hurriedly utter them a word at a time 
till he must pause for breath. And he needs help especially 
in recognizing periods and semicolons and their meaning. 
But these matters are of less importance; they are only 
contributory to our major concern of getting — and less 
often of giving to others — the writer's ideas. For this 
reason, because one must first catch and hold his thought, 
silent reading is the more important of the two and is here 
given major emphasis. We must not overlook, either, the 
frequent effect of oral reading in keeping a pupil's pace 
too slow. 

C. SUMMARY OF ESSENTIALS IN TEACHING 
COMPREHENSION 

Dr. E. L. Thorndike has stated with helpful cogency 
the educational conditions essential to improvement, as 

28 This is well discussed in a Bulletin, prepared under the super- 
vision of Principal Charles E. Springmeyer, P. S. 85, Brooklyn, 
for the New York Society for the Experimental Study of Education, 
(December, 1919 — v. i, No. 2). 

13 



194 READING AND LITERATURE 

derived from the study of psychology. 29 It will be worth 
our while to try applying these conditions to the improve- 
ment in comprehension which we are trying to effect and 
thus to summarize this chapter. 

THE PUPIL'' S AIM 

First of all is assumed an aim, and that aim the pupil's, 
for the mastery of the problem. We have found various 
forms of stimulus useful in promoting the most necessary 
aims : for example, using the scores and graphs of standard 
tests, and dividing the class into groups according to real 
ability and giving them tasks and liberties accordingly. 
Where excellent reading matter, really close to the pupils' 
present interests, is available, and where genuine mastery 
of difficulties is made the condition for granting increasing 
freedom of choice and the privilege of attacking still harder 
but more engrossing problems, there is sufficient motive- 
force for all normal pupils in all but their abnormal moods. 

In particular we have emphasized the necessity of 
recognizing differentiation of purposes, and not requiring 
the same slavish grind of " chewing and digesting " for 
reading matter which should be treated with a different 
aim and method. Where a pupil can choose his own 
method to suit purposes he has conceived and is carrying 
out, he reads intelligently. Where there is occasion he 
will dig into the essentials of a subject, weigh statements 
carefully and compare them in different books, go to 
sources if necessary, understand in detail by whatever 
means of dictionary or reference work, and finally get 
from his work not a series of memorized statements — 
though memory of the essentials is easy to gain on a basis 
of such study — but a sense of the main issue and its con- 
tributory parts, and a comprehension of everything else 
that is germane to his real purpose. To be able thus to 

29 Educational Psychology, v. ii, pp. 213 ff. ; 230 ff. ; Briefer Course, 
208 ff., 219 ff. 



EFFICIENT METHOD 195 

select what books and periodicals should be chewed and 
digested, what ones to read lightly, and, of course, what 
ones to cast aside altogether — and to treat each after its 
kind — is the final test of an intelligent and fruitful teach- 
ing of reading. 

TRYING TO FORM USEFUL HABITS IN EFFECTIVE ORDER 

On a basis like this of specific, real, and various aims, 
it is possible for the teacher, and for the pupil as well, to 
realize what habits are essential and to work definitely 
in an efficient order at those. For example, where by 
means of comprehension tests the pupil in junior high 
school discovers his need of making wider eye-sweeps 
across a line, he can work specifically with that in view 
and measure his own improvement. Where it is clear that 
the class needs to use the dictionary more efficiently, drills 
in this, animated by a spirit of competition, may be lively, 
brisk, and fruitful. And so for the rest — exercises, for 
example, in reading paragraphs and then answering in- 
terpretive questions or summing up the matter in a 
sentence, and working problems or doing experiments ac- 
cording to directions. The specific ability desired and the 
specific need for it- can be clearly put before the pupils, and 
the method of its mastery suggested if necessary. The 
attempt has been made in these chapters, by analysis of the 
results of comprehension tests, to sift out really funda- 
mental matters for consideration. 

As to the order of attack, it can clearly be shown, for 
instance, that to attempt detailed mastery of a chapter 
before a view of the whole is gained can hardly be effect- 
ive, and is certainly many times more difficult. Reason- 
able pace in reading, too — probably at least 120 words a 
minute for silent reading in the elementary school — seems 
prerequisite to increase in understanding what is read. All 



1 96 READING AND LITERATURE 

this the diagnosis of the tests and the provision of real 
purposes makes possible. 

INCREASING SATISFACTION WITH RIGHT AND DISSATIS- 
FACTION WITH WRONG HABITS 

With these bases secured and with a specific check on 
results, not by memory tests only, but by means of definite 
directions to be followed or interpretive questions to be 
answered, the pupil can know at once whether he has or 
has not secured from his reading the thing he set out to 
get. In most cases, as in the answers to the questions 
about the children with red hair or about school attendance 
in Franklin, his answers may be shown as clearly right 
or wrong as those in problems in mathematics. Thus all 
the good of merely memory questions may be had from 
such checking — and a great deal more. The best exam- 
inations in comprehension are obviously those which the 
pupil takes with the reading matter before him; there is 
no reason, and much loss, in closed books for this pur- 
pose. Thus a situation like that of real life is provided, 
and not an artificial one for schoolroom use only. In 
such cases, with purposes genuine and tests of ability 
both real and definite, satisfaction with right and dissatis- 
faction with wrong habits can be unquestionably secured, 
and thus improvement will have back of it this necessary 
condition also. 

SATISFACTION WITH READING AND WITH IMPROVEMENT 

IN IT 

All the conditions for teaching comprehension which 
have been proposed throughout this chapter have been 
planned to secure the basic essential to continuing im- 
provement in intelligent reading, both in school and later : 
that is, a growing satisfaction in the work and in one's 
improvement in skill. The provision of real purposes 



EFFICIENT METHOD 197 

such as govern good reading outside of school is clearly 
fundamental. The clear evidence of improvement and its 
reward by increasing privileges and by immunities from 
mere technical exercise are equally vital. Perhaps most 
essential of all is the provision of excellent matter for 
reading and the granting of increasing freedom to 
browse in its fields. It is satisfactions like this that induce 
intelligent reading in situations out of school. The more 
we can duplicate these in the schoolroom, the more certain 
we are to secure the kind and quantity of improvement 
that we desire. 

D. WHAT READING TO TEACH WHERE 

From the considerations which have been proposed, 
we may lay out four points toward organizing a course 
in reading: 

(1) Since reading rate is pretty definitely and firmly 
established by the end of the fourth school year, most of 
the energies of that grade, as well as of the grades below, 
should go toward cultivating speed and fluency in reading, 
and little toward detailed analysis. 

(2) More should be done in the intermediate grades 
(fourth through sixth) in giving pupils a sense of the 
" large units " of books — not alone paragraphs, but sec- 
tions and chapters — toward fixing a good pace in reading, 
and toward cultivating ready use of simple reference ma- 
terial: dictionaries and encyclopedias and handbooks. 

(3) Regular courses in library reference such as have 
been described should continue through the junior high 
school years, and parallel with this, such study of difficul- 
ties as actually arise in mathematics or science texts or 
shop directions should develop pupils' skill in insuring 
accurate understanding of significant details by means of 
questions like those of the comprehension tests. Here, as 



198 READING AND LITERATURE 

Professor Lyman well suggests, 30 such essentials of effi- 
cient reading or study as he lists should be concentrated 
upon and given sufficient time to insure adequate mastery ; 
for these are at the basis of success in every subject of 
study in school. 

(4) Only in senior high school belongs any fuller de- 
tailed analysis of the structure of essay or chapter than a 
discovery of its main point and chief structural divisions ; 
readiness in discovering these essentials is certainly far 
more valuable than any minuter study anywhere. 

As has been suggested before, development of ability 
in three types of reading — (1) rapid skimming and skip- 
ping, (2) tasting, or seeking and selecting what is to one's 
purpose, and (3) more thorough study — should continue 
together, and increasing consciousness should be secured 
of these various purposes and of how to attain them. 

Thus the teaching of comprehension is seen to require 
as strenuous work as any demanded by the formal and me- 
chanical drudgery of old-fashioned grammar, dictionary 
study, and memorizing and reciting of details. The drills 
required may be realized as actually essential to the ful- 
filment of genuine purposes, or may themselves be in- 
formed with a spirit of vigorous competition, not at all 
personal and mean-spirited. Where these things are so, 
the realization of the objective to be reached and of one's 
actual, objectively measured progress toward it furnishes 
an altogether different light upon the whole business. 
Then increasing skill becomes a conscious liberation, and 
an opportunity to use powers thus gained may make them 
as eagerly sought-after as similar skills in games of base- 
ball or jackstones. Such teaching of comprehension by 
no means allows letting down the standards of hard work 

30 Op. cit. p. 602 ; Mr. Lyman says, in grade 7 ; if the work is not 
done there, it certainly should be at the first point beyond where we 
can catch our pupil. 



EFFICIENT METHOD i 99 

held in the most formal classrooms to-day, or forbids 
strict conditions of advancement. It rather aims to make 
possible a fuller realization and achievement of such 
standards as are of proved worth, and thus goes far to 
insure a more efficient product of our reading instruction. 
If we can deal with these matters and achieve these 
standards, as we should, in reading periods, we shall have 
pupils really equipped to gain enriched and deepened life 
from the genuine literature which we give them in litera- 
ture hours. And these hours can then pass without un- 
pleasant intrusion there of the consciously purposive and 
matter-of-fact attitude of mind which is appropriate for 
solving problems, for gaining necessary knowledge and 
skill, but which is not most fitted for gaining appreciation 
of our own lives and experience. 



CHAPTER VII 

CLASS HELP IN THE UNDERSTANDING OF 
LITERATURE 

The reasons which suggest separating the teaching of 
reading from the teaching of literature have been already 
suggested. Mastery of the technical equipment of read- 
ing is obviously necessary for gaining realization of the 
scenes and events and ideas which literature portrays; 
but, as any one realizes who can recall his struggles to 
learn a foreign language, the frame of mind which leads 
to conquest of vocabulary and inflections and construc- 
tions is not most conducive to appreciative understanding 
of a writer's mood or picture or the nuances of his ideas. 
Only as one achieves emancipation through this conquest 
can he grow beyond painful crawling from one construct- 
ion to another, and stand erect to view the landscape 
or the happenings about him. But it is essential that this 
sort of realization and enjoyment come, in our pupils' 
experience of English at least, not after but throughout 
their literature courses in both grades and high school. 
A part of their school-day should be set aside for enjoying 
great experiences which they have already sufficient skill, 
as well as a broad enough background of living, to appre- 
hend and interpret. Such enjoyment is not won by dint 
of the earnest and constant purpose which makes possible 
gains in the technique of reading or in solving other prob- 
lems ; it thrives in an altogether different mood — the eager 
and happy seeking for adventures which makes possible our 
best and most fruitful approach to great literature. 

Moreover, as Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch well main- 
tains, 1 we must " treat the classic absolutely ; not for any 

Quiller-Couch: On the Art of Reading (Putnam, 1920), p. 225. 
200 



CLASS HELP IN LITERATURE 201 

secondary or derivative purpose, or purpose recommended 
as useful by a manual, but at first solely to interpret the 
meaning which its author intended ; ... in short, we 
should trust any given masterpiece for its operation, on 
ourselves and on others." The turning of classics into 
drill-lessons on grammar or etymology, or into required 
memorizing of useful facts in notes, is their certain de- 
struction. In literature hours let us allow children to 
range the forests with Robin Hood or explore impossible 
regions of faery with Alice or Puck; let them make the 
pleasant acquaintance, when they have sufficient maturity 
to appreciate these persons, of Sir Roger and Silas Lap- 
ham, and of writers like Stevenson and Charles Lamb 
who comment astutely and engagingly upon life ; above all, 
let them share the keen perceptions and imaginings of 
poets. It is for these purposes that the literature class 
should be emancipated from all requirements of drill, and 
also from the necessity of dealing with the subject matter 
of useful knowledge. Here we may allow a free space 
for experience that is vividly and humanly true, but quite 
unrelated to the making of bread or nails. Out of such 
contacts can come increased wisdom from actual living. 2 
It is this sort of contact with excellent literature, under 
conditions for the fullest appreciation, which Professor 
Sharp suggests for home reading. 3 That such excellent 
realization of the best in books can be and is being accom- 
plished in schoolrooms properly organized and humanized, 
Dr. Sharp would be the first to admit. Under the usual 
formal conditions, however, it has rarely been possible. 

In other words, as was suggested in the previous chap- 
ter, "the literature of power" is rarely to be "chewed and 
digested," in grades and high school at least ; it is mainly 

a Brander Matthews: These Many Years (New York, 1917), 
PP. 394-5- 

'Dallas Lore Sharp: " Education for Individuality" — Atlantic 
Monthly June, 1920 and "Education for Authority," Ibid, July, 1921. 



202 READING AND LITERATURE 

to be ' 'apprehended" — taken hold of, that is, as genuine and 
living experience. 4 When we find that technical defi- 
ciencies prevent real experience from emerging out of 
the printed page, we shall do well to give incidental 
help for solving the immediate difficulty. We should cer- 
tainly make note of the specific trouble, and attend to it 
fully in drill periods at another time and in another, more 
purposeful and problem-solving mind. With the mastery 
of these necessary problems will come constantly greater 
freedom to enjoy excellent literature. And there should 
be more place than there has usually been in schoolrooms 
for this free and happy reading. There should be class 
hours when the pupils enjoy their bookstand the teacher 
sets a good example by enjoying his, each for himself, 5 as 
well as hours for interchange and cross-fertilization of 
experiences within and without books. 

LITERATURE AS REQUIRING REAL STUDY 

But to get such experience from books must not be 
understood as a merely frivolous and idle pastime. It will 
be carried on in the "play spirit" 6 provided we conceive 
of this not as a spirit of foolery or mere gratification, but 
as the spirit and ideal of those who create art and music 
and literature. We may better, indeed, say the artistic, 
creative spirit. Our attitude in such reading should be 
constructive rather than critical. We must build up the 
story in imagination, not analyze and pick it apart. In 
no other way can we come to understand genuine litera- 
ture. We can then, if we like, form an opinion of the 
writer's work according as he has or has not helped us in 
thus coming-at reality. 

4 Quiller-Couch : On the Art of Reading, pp. 21 ff. 

5 E. C. Campagnac : The Teaching of Composition (Boston), 
pp. 38-9. 

"See for example H, Caldwell Cook's The Play Way (Heinemann, 
London, 1915). 



CLASS HELP IN LITERATURE 203 

All this requires of readers wide-awake and constant, 
vigorously expended effort, but not chiefly in unraveling 
constructions and pursuing word-meanings, figures of 
speech, or allusions. The major problem consists in bring- 
ing former experience to bear, as we have seen, in imag- 
inatively dramatizing and perceiving the action that con- 
stitutes or underlies story or poem or essay : sounds, color 
and movement, feel of the push and sting of storms, heat 
and chill — whatever of our stored equipment the literary 
artist calls upon us to bring to his book. Such perception 
is at the basis of both emotions and ideas to be had from 
literature. Only as we secure this first do we actually 
understand, and only so can we in any but a loose and 
vague sense appreciate, a piece of literature. 

THE BOOK CLUBS 

We are, I think, indebted to Professor W. S. 
Hinchman for the first explicitly stated idea of the 
literature class as ideally, and in actual possibility, a read- 
ing club. Too often teachers have formally analyzed 
prescribed classics in the English hours, and then, if they 
were earnestly desirous of developing children's good read- 
ing, have used their energy in conducting literary and other 
clubs outside of school time. But this has only confirmed 
the impression that really vital and excellent reading mat- 
ter is one thing and the literature-class list quite another. 
If we are to break down this false notion, let us merge 
the two types of literary study. 

Mr. Hinchman' s article proposing the reading clubs 7 
has revolutionized many classroom procedures. The 
plan consists in part of allowing pupils to read at their 
individual choice from generously wide lists of wholesome 
matter, and to discuss in class what they have read. In 

7 W. S. Hinchman : " Reading Clubs instead of Literature Classes," 
The English Journal, vi, 88. 



2o 4 READING AND LITERATURE 

Mr. Hinchman's view this procedure fits most especially 
the grades and the junior high school or intermediate 
school. The sort of class work that is most fruitful we 
shall consider presently; the purpose and possible results 
of the plan may be noted briefly here. Of course an end 
desired by all teachers of literature is a directing of the 
pupils' poor and random choices of books and magazines, 
by discovery of more excellent ones with like interests, 
toward a development of such criteria of selection as can 
be applied after the young people have passed beyond 
the influence of English teachers' prescriptions or sug- 
gestions. Such directing appears to be accomplished in 
literature classes conducted as proper book clubs, more 
surely than by any other plan that I have seen tried. 
Practically all the books of the college entrance lists, Mr. 
Hinchman and others have found, are read intelligently 
by most pupils under this regime before these writings are 
taken up by the whole class. The difference in attitude 
with which the books are approached, under such a sys- 
tem and under one of seriatim compulsions, need hardly 
be stressed. This best typifies the principle of the " door 
ajar " as inciting to adventures in books. 

THE BOOKS FOR THESE PURPOSES 

Clearly the lists of books for reading clubs must con- 
tain only excellent matter, not merely what the pupils 
would read anyhow and read quite as well without guid- 
ance. But the choices must be both wide and flexible. 
The pupils will often enlarge their teacher's range of 
reading each year quite as much as he enlarges any of 
theirs, and by many fine additions, too. All such worthy 
discoveries should be eligible to the accredited list. My 
own classes have made me acquainted, for example, with 
W. W. Gibson and W. H. Hudson: only last month a 
seventh-grade boy came in with Far Away and Long Ago 



CLASS HELP IN LITERATURE 205 

for me to read. To their less desirable favorites the 
teacher should try to be courteously attentive. When they 
introduce Eleanor Porter or J. O. Curwood or R. W. 
Service, he should read the books. He will be patient 
with meretricious appeal, because he knows how it is 
effected and that it will lose its power before a better array 
of literary influences. He must be too wise to condemn 
flatly and futilely what children honestly admire, and thus 
weaken the force of his recommendations of better books. 
But when he has shown genuine pleasure in their best 
findings, the pupils will realize at least that his judgments 
are meant to be fair and true. So they will know that 
when he in his turn recommends, it will be because he 
knows them and their sort of choices, and honestly thinks 
that what he suggests is likely to be real and worth-while, 
enjoyable experience to them. 

BETTERING A LIMITED EQUIPMENT 

This chapter has assumed a richer equipment of 
books than is as yet available in most grade schools and 
high schools. It should be the business of every teacher 
to aid the campaign of the national library committee by 
distributing the information which they supply and urging 
action upon it by supervisors and school boards. 8 Until 
adequate facilities are available, satisfactory enrichment 
of experience cannot be even reasonably well attained. 

But while this struggle is in progress it is necessary to 
do one's best with what equipment is at hand. In one 
large school system, for example, the few sets of books 
supplied by the school board, besides being inadequate 
and poorly adapted to their purpose, are positively con- 
fined to the building and the classrooms. In the junior 
high schools the pupils have only two study periods a 
week in all subjects. There is no school library. Under 

8 See reference, p. 185, above. 



2o6 READING AND LITERATURE 

such conditions teachers are expected to promote excel- 
cent literature. 

As usual, the public library cooperates loyally, getting 
all the books possible, and sending sets to the class 
teachers. Most books requested are secured for circula- 
tion. Unfortunately, the beautifully illustrated ones, re- 
stricted from circulation, probably of necessity, in many 
libraries, are not available in the branches. And all this 
does not solve the problem of books for class reading — 
for the occasions when all should be reading and dis- 
cussing informally the same book. Real literature teach- 
ing requires more laboratory equipment than has usually 
been insisted upon, and most of that equipment should 
consist, in usual circumstances, of three sorts of books : 

i. The best possible range of choice and excel- 
lent reading matter for the book-club lists. 9 

2. Beautiful illustrated books, which can do 

more for inculcating realization and fine ap- 
preciation than most teaching can compass. 

3. A few sets of books for reading all together, 

so that those who cannot afford to buy these 
can borrow them without appearing paupers. 
These should, in general, be the few books 
of " selections " which we consider indis- 
pensable for class study, but least necessary 
for the small private libraries which we want 
children to begin building up — chiefly 
" reading " rather than " literature " texts. 

"These should be in good library bindings, and not look like, 
or be, cheap texts ; Dr. Ernest Horn, of the University of Iowa, tells 
me of a doctoral study made by Miss Florence Bamberger, now of 
Johns Hopkins University, entitled " The Effect of the Physical Make- 
up of a Book upon Children's Selection," which shows that the same 
books, in the same position on the library shelves, after being attrac- 
tively rebound, were taken out many times as often as when they were 
in drab' or shoddy dress. 



CLASS HELP IN LITERATURE 207 

In small villages and in country districts with poor 
libraries or none at all in the neighborhood or even in the 
school buildings, the teaching of literature is clearly most 
difficult of all. Here, in most states, the free traveling 
libraries are ready to help in generous fashion. The 
teacher's first recourse here should be to the State Library 
Commission. He can thus secure a constant stream of 
excellent books, often sent at his own choice. But the 
teacher should in addition make every effort toward 
establishing, in town and school, a beginning of collec- 
tions which are both excellent, and sure in their appeal 
to both children and parents. Sometimes, when each pupil 
has bought books for his own use in the reading club, many 
of the children will contribute them toward such a library. 

" TURNING THE CLASS BACK ON ITSELF " 

The teacher who most successfully directs such experi- 
ments as this will make all possible use of the best pupils 
in his classes, just as any society succeeds most surely 
which uses to the full its forces of leadership and in- 
telligence. The pupils who read fine literature, if they 
can be helped to portray attractively the pleasure they have 
found, will be more influential than any teacher can be. 
When they tell with keen relish of their fun in observing 
Mr. Pickwick, and perhaps read their classmates an 
especially jolly incident, they will be followed by more 
than can get copies of the book. It is obvious that most of 
the success of such a plan must depend on the quality of 
the class reports and discussions. 10 The spread of excel- 
lent choices in reading proceeds by their influence, abetted 
by that of the teacher. So does the branding, most ef- 
fectual when it is done by fellow pupils, of books that they 
come to consider not worth their while. An intelligent 

10 This is further considered in Chapter IX, pp. 262 ff. 



208 READING AND LITERATURE 

direction of such reports, which should generally be oral 
and as informal as possible, contributes greatly to the 
choice and understanding of literature by our pupils. 

In the interpretation of what is read a great deal can be 
gained by what Professor C. S. Pendleton calls " turn- 
ing the class back on itself." When a pupil has done full 
work on a given assignment — the study of a poem or 
novel — he sometimes goes on to a further job; he need 
never wait and loaf, for there is always room for his 
growing ability in the work planned ahead, and each 
one is scored for amount as well as quality of accomplish- 
ment. But often he is allowed instead to aid the slower 
members of the class. And he is helped to do this in the 
right way — not by telling them the answers to questions, 
but by questioning them to direct their search for solutions. 
This seems a better training for leaders in a social state 
than segregating the able in special classes and giving them 
often an unfortunate exaggeration of self-assurance and 
a separate cramming of knowledge. 

The concluding chapters of this study will discuss cer- 
tain special problems of literature teaching: (i) the pro- 
vision of backgrounds and approaches to literature of 
special difficulty, including the use of good oral reading 
by the teacher to open the way to understanding it: (2) 
the value of composition — the preparation of good reviews 
of books and the attempt at literature for oneself : and 
finally (3) the use of dramatic reading and informal dram- 
atization — for developing the pupils' literary experience 
and understanding. 11 The remainder of this chapter will 
consider the problem : What class discussion and individual 
study of literature is good and fruitful, and what sort 
must be said to produce harmful rather than good results ? 

" Chapters VIII-X. ~ 



CLASS HELP IN LITERATURE 209 

GOOD VERSUS BAD STUDY OF LITERATURE 

In the first place, granted that mastery of necessary 
mechanics is assured, what sort of study is necessary in 
the reading of literature? The problem is well put before 
us in the following incident from Understood Betsy, by 
Mrs. Dorothy Canfield Fisher. 12 Betsy and her uncle's 
family are sitting by the fire in the farmhouse kitchen, 
and the little girl, though she "never did, except at school," 
has agreed to read aloud while her uncle mends harness. 
They have chosen Scott's poems, and something that 
sounds to Betsy like the "Staggit Eve:" 

The stag at eve had drunk his fill 
Where danced the moon on Monan's rill, 

she began, and it was as though she had stepped 
into a boat and was swept off by a strong cur- 
rent. She did not know what all the words 
meant, and she could not pronounce a good 
many of the names, but nobody interrupted to 
correct her, and she read on and on, steadied by 
the strongly-marked rhythm, drawn forward 
swiftly from one clanging, sonorous rhyme to 
another. Uncle Henry nodded his head in time 
to the rise and fall of her voice and now and then 
stopped his work to look at her with bright, 
eager old eyes. He knew some of the places by 
heart, evidently, for once in a while his voice 
would join the little girl's for a couplet or two. 
They chanted together thus: 

A moment listened to the cry 
That thickened as the chase drew nigh ; 
Then, as the headmost foes appeared, 
With one brave bound the copse he cleared. 

13 Pp. 129-132 (Henry Holt, 1917) ; reprinted by courtesy of 
Mrs. Fisher and of the publishers. 

14 



2io READING AND LITERATURE 

At the last line Uncle Henry flung his arm out 
wide, and the child felt as though the deer had 
made his great leap there, before her eyes. 

" I've seen 'em jump just like that," broke in 
Uncle Henry. "A two-three-hundred-pound stag 
go up over a four-foot fence just like a piece of 
thistledown in the wind." 

"Uncle Henry," asked Elizabeth Ann, "what 
is a copse?" 

" I don't know," said Uncle Henry indiffer- 
ently. " Something in the woods, must be. 
Underbrush most likely. You can always tell 
words you don't know by the sense of the whole 
thing. Go on." 

And, stretching forward free and far, 

The child's voice took up the chant again. She 
read faster and faster as it got more exciting. 
Uncle Henry joined in on 

For jaded now, and spent with toil, 
Embossed with foam, and dark with soil, 
While every gasp with sobs he drew, 
The laboring stag strain'd full in view. 

The little girl's heart beat fast. She fled along 
through the next lines, stumbling desperately 
over the hard words, but seeing the headlong 
chase through them clearly as through tree- 
trunks in a forest. Uncle Henry broke in in a 
triumphant shout: 

The wily quarry shunn'd the shock 
And turn'd him from the opposing rock ; 
Then, dashing down a darksome glen, 
Soon lost to hound and hunter's ken, 
In the deep Trossach's wildest nook 
His solitary refuge took. 



CLASS HELP IN LITERATURE 211 

" Oh my ! " cried Elizabeth Ann, laying down 
the book. " He got away, didn't he? I was so 
afraid he wouldn't!" 

" I can just hear those dogs yelping, can't 
you?" said Uncle Henry. 

" Yelled on the view the opening pack. 

" Sometimes you hear 'em that way up on the 
slope of Hemlock Mountain back of us, when 
they get to running a deer." 

"What say we have some pop-corn?" sug- 
gested Aunt Abigail. " Betsy, don't you want to 
pop us some? " 

I have presented this incident because it is quite dif- 
ferent from conventional schoolroom procedures. If you 
had to choose the experience that would most have fed 
your own understanding and appreciation of The Lady 
of the Lake, would you not vote for this rather than for 
the study of an edition with notes and painful reference 
to the dictionary every so often? There are points of 
detail that we should doubtless criticize here; there is no 
valid reason why one should not be ready to help in pro- 
nouncing troublesome new words or to clear obscurity by 
answering questions swiftly, so that the view should not 
be blocked by these tree-trunks. Or, better still, for a new 
bit of difficult literature the teacher will often read with 
pleasure and simple vividness himself, and so break down 
all obstacles to immediate enjoyment. 

But the important point is that this pleasant fireside 
reading by Betsy contains about all the ne^dej^elements 
for enjoyable and profitable class study of literature — a 
sympathetic sharing of the experience the story offers, 
and help in all essentials of realisation. For the pro- 
nunciation of new words is not an essential for this, and 
few if any details not explained in the poem itself are of real 



212 READING AND LITERATURE 

significance for the understanding of this story. I have 
already recorded my own stupid performance as a boy in 
reading this same poem; I spoiled the swiftness of move- 
ment and got only a dim and blurred idea of the whole 
story because I conscientiously perused all Scott's notes, 
multiplied by the fertile devices of an editor's scholarship. 
So I had no consecutive view of the action as a series of 
vivid happenings. Far better the quite minor inadequacies 
of Betsy's experience than the futile and meaningless mul- 
tiplication of "deciduous information," as Dr. Bobbitt calls 
it. "One of the most mischievous superstitions of educa- 
tion has been that when a thing is presented it must be 
completely understood. 13 

THE CURSE OF IRRELEVANT DETAILS AND INFORMATION 

One thing only is of importance in the reading of story 
or poem or essay: the realization of experience in vivid 
and cumulative succession, rounded into a full view of 
the whole. No fact of geography or history or science 
not fundamentally necessary to this major purpose has 
any business cluttering the ground while we are reading 
literature. No mere information about biography or 
sources, influences or editions, belongs here. Scott, to be 
sure, with another part of his interest, and usually — it is 
fortunate — after he had finished a poem or a novel, de- 
lighted in piling antiquarian knowledge into its notes. 
Sometimes he cumbered his pages with this erudition and 
produced that cluttered effect which, as a Frenchman 
shrewdly remarked, makes impossible any view of the 
whole in many English buildings and English novels. (It 
may be supposed that he had overlooked or forgotten 
Hugo's and Balzac's sins of this sort.) Some readers, 
usually adult readers with like interests, find real 

M Franklin Bobbitt, The Curriculum, p. 233. 



CLASS HELP IN LITERATURE 213 

pleasure in following Scott on such rambles. But while 
doing that, they are engaged in something else than the 
comprehension and appreciation of literature : they are on 
a scientific chase after facts, and not on a literary one of 
sympathetic re-creation of a writer's story. For a teacher 
to enforce such excursions with the idea that they have 
anything essential to do with enjoyment and comprehension 
is a most unfortunate misdirection of energies. 

The question of allusions is a case in point. We all 
know the keen pleasure of finding references to familiar 
stories — of Aladdin or Apollo or Ruth — in our reading of 
poetry or prose. But it is a quite different thing to hand 
out in a note a cold, dissected, and unrelated explanation : 
"From Book IV of Paradise Lost; the original passage, 
here misquoted, runs thus: ..." That means no 
pleasure, no added realization or experience; it is simply 
information as dull as can be imagined. Of course the 
scholarly mind delights in such items and treasures them ; 
but this has no necessary relation to literary enjoyment 
in schools. 

The obvious truth suggested by the fact of genuine 
pleasure in allusions is that we_should_SQ far as pos- 
sible equip pupils with real experience of such funda- 
mental incidents and characters as constantly recur in our 
English literature — the stories of the Greek myths and of 
Homer and the Old Testament, The Arabian Nights and 
Gulliver's Travels and Robinson Crusoe, Mother Goose, 
and Shakespeare's plays. Then, as allusions occur, we can 
in informal and pleasant fashion stimulate their recogni- 
tion, not as task-work, but by arousal to rinding pleasant 
matters lightly concealed in the weave of a story. But to 
cumber notes with tracings of obscure allusions to quite 
dead poetry, as I myself have been guilty of doing, and 
particularly to require attention in literature study to such 



2i 4 READING AND LITERATURE 

bad and wrong notes, is an utter perversion of their good 
and right contribution to literary experience. 14 

The same is true of biography. It is conceded that a 
knowledge of such part of a writer's life as influenced 
his literary contribution is often essential to understand- 
ing what he wrote. So it has been deduced that to present 
a full biography, with dates carefully verified, and to note 
every migration, friendship, and bit of gossip about an 
author, serves in some mysterious way to enhance the 
high-school boy's understanding and appreciation of poem 
or novel. Texts built on this princpile, and stufTed be- 
sides with graduate-seminar findings about editions and 
variants, are as plenty as blackberries. Their information 
remains, mercifully, unread and unregarded for the most 
part ; but in the hands of conscientious teachers such 
a book sometimes does untold evil to pupils who are re- 
quired to master its sterile contents. At the least, such 
editing for high schools is a sad misdirection and waste 
of intelligence. 

A true idea of the value of biography is illustrated by 
Mr. Hayward. 15 It is of no importance whatever, he in- 
sists, that Milton was born in Bread Street on such a date, 
or that he was thrice married (that never- forgotten fact), 
or that he was in his university days called " the lady of 
Christ's/' But it is memorable and essential to know 
of four most significant influences in his life : that he 
postponed his design of a great epic poem to serve the 
state; that he made an unhappy marriage with a lady of 
the cavalier party; that he became blind, largely through 
persistent overwork for the government of Cromwell; 
and that he was bitterly disillusioned and disappointed by 
the collapse of the Puritan revolution. Realizing^the 

14 See F. T. Baker, in Carpenter, Baker, and Scott, The Teaching 
of English, pp. 167 ff. 

15 Hayward : The Lesson hi Appreciation, pp. 99-108. 



CLASS HELP IN LITERATURE 215 

fundamental nature of the principle thus illustrated should 
go far to help us sort out the bad and futile in texts and 
instruction from the rewarding and vital. Whatever, 
for given pupils of a given development, actually con- 
tributes essentially to understanding the experience pre- 
sented in poem or prose — that we must labor earnestly 
to help pupils realise as a fundamental matter. Whatever 
does not so contribute, no matter of what other value, is 
merely fact, and altogether outside our purpose. 

The superstition that knowledge is power, which most 
people take to mean that memorized facts are power, is a 
curse upon our educational institutions. Whenever we dis- 
cover an item of information, no matter how remotely 
or fancifully related to the case in hand, we are tempted 
to seize upon it and embalm it in explanatory notes. We 
find and note the altitudes of mountains and the area 
and longitude of islands, as if that made any difference 
to our enjoyment of Robinson Crusoe's or Jules Verne's 
experiences. We become copious and elaborate in our 
glosses on various readings of the text and in comments 
on other quite extraneous matters. In one of the best 
dog stories I have ever read a perfectly harmless plant- 
utterly insignificant to the progress or interest of the story 
— happens to be passed by. An editor moused upon this 
poor herb and explained it thus in a school edition : "An 
araliaceous shrub, rufus panax, . . . "—and aralmceous 
itself isn't to be found in any dictionary but the largest 
and fullest ! This is merely an illustration of the absurdity 
of note-makers ; but it diagnoses accurately the source of 
their distemper. If they miss anything, they think, they 
will be cited for heedlessness and ignorance. They must 
peer at every minutia of the book with hawk-like search 
and pour out copious explanation. So, they may suppose, 
many choice scraps of knowledge will be got into the 



216 READING AND LITERATURE 

heads of a careless generation, to charge them more fully 
with power for the fight of life. 

Publishers tell us that books which do not make the 
impression of scholarly thoroughness will not be used 
or regarded. And of course they are right in the sense 
that no book edited in deficient knowledge of its field can 
possibly be given consideration. But more than fulness 
of knowledge is necessary; it is essential that nothing be 
put in which does not make a definite contribution to 
realized experience. This requires that one be really 
scholarly; and more, it requires actual knowledge of real 
children's real needs and desires, so that one shall select 
and reject wisely for gaining the end that we all should 
have in view. The play, the poem, the story — the living 
experience — is the thing, and only what contributes to 
experiencing it is of the slightest value in the teaching 
of literature. 

To take to pieces and analyze " curiously " the Odys- 
sey or the Vision of Sir Launfal or to fill them with 
irrelevant notes almost surely destroys their real value 
and purpose, for school children's use. It may substitute 
another value which is preferable for the scholar — some 
special insight, for example, into ancient customs or into 
theories of rhythm. But this puts another value in place 
of the purpose of the writer; it dims and blurs the clear 
view of experience which he intended. Whatjwejieed 
to do most in literature-teaching is to get out of the way 
wherever possible and let the writer do what he purposes 
with liis ; readers ; he generally knows how. If he is a good 
writer, he succeeds in bringing men and children before 
his story, not in a critical and analytic spirit, but in one of 
creation — of building up at his suggestion the experience 
which he had and tries to present. We are forever stand- 
ing in his way and hindering him with our introductions, 
notes, assignments, and examinations. 



CLASS HELP IN LITERATURE 217 

Fortunately, it is possible to present evidence that in 
objecting to much current teaching of literature I am not 
constructing a fearful bogle out of a spirit actually harm- 
less. In two recent studies the definite bad results of over- 
attention to minute details, and of other educational sins 
in the teaching of literature, have been clearly noted and in 
some degree measured. 

In his recent doctoral dissertation, 16 Professor Hosic 
examined four sets of reading books for grades four 
to six to discover the helps to study which they contain. 
'The emphasis was found to fall upon questions pertaining 
to the language used or the facts presented rather than 
upon conduct, technique, or expressional activities." In 
contrast to this, among authorities as to the nature and pur- 
pose of literature, "imaginative realization of the piece 
as a whole as a means to enjoyment and the enrichment 
of experience was found to be central " — that is, oftenest 
stressed. To weigh these differing emphases Dr. Hosic 
tested the teaching of " four poems in two pairs of sixth- 
grade classes so as to alternate the methods used. For 
example, Holmes' Chambered Nautilus was taught by 
means of an informal suggestive presentation of the 
whole to Class A, and by means of detailed questions to 
Class B. Then Blake's Tiger was presented by means of 
detailed questions to Class A and as a whole to Class B. 
Browning's How They Brought the Good News and 
Reed's Sheridan y s Ride followed in the same way. Classes 
X and Y were handled similarly," but with poems and 
methods reversed. In a preliminary test, classes which 
merely read over or listened to the poems were found to 
prefer The Tiger and Sheridan's Ride in a proportion of 
four to one. Nevertheless, after the methods of teaching 

10 James F. Hosic: Empirical Studies in School Reading, Teachers 
College 'Contributions to Educational Theory. Columbia University, 
New York City, 1921. 



218 READING AND LITERATURE 

described above, each class when tested as to its prefer- 
ences was found to choose whichever poem had been taught 
to it as a whole. Thus, by being chewed upon at too great 
length the favorite poems were actually put below the less 
favored ones which were more skilfully and reasonably 
presented. Care was taken to find out that the poems 
which were not taught at full length were understood in 
their essential meaning. 

Mr. Hosic concludes : " There is apparently a dis- 
parity between the aims and methods of literature teach- 
ing per se and the aims and methods of classroom teach- 
ers and of editors of textbooks. The latter emphasize the 
linguistic element and familiarity with details of fact. 
. . . Method in teaching literature is a powerful factor, 
and may practically determine the attitude of a large 
majority of a class toward a literary selection. Probably 
the methods now used both by teachers and editors are 
largely unfitted to attain the objects set up by the critical 
and educational authorities for the study of literature 
in school." 17 

This is reenforced by the findings when the Abbott 
and Trabue Poetry Tests ls were tried on a great many 
pupils from grades five and six upward. I quote again 
from the published account of Professor Abbott's report 
on the tests before the college section of the English Coun- 
cil. 19 " The percentage of right choices — i.e., of choices 
of the original poem as the best — for the several grades 
or classes of readers was presented in a distribution curve. 
The curves for Masefield's ' Sea Fever ' and Aldrich's 
' Memory,' presented as typical of all, are almost identical. 

17 Quoted by Dr. Hosic's permission, from his preliminary sum- 
mary of his study. 

18 Chapter II, pp. 54 ff., above ; see the Teachers College Record 
for March, 1921. 

ia English Journal, January, 1921 (10: 54). 



CLASS HELP IN LITERATURE 219 

It was considered that by the law of chance 25 per cent, 
of the choices would be correct. 20 Pupils from grades five 
and six just attained this score; those from the seventh to 
ninth grades fell below this; 21 those from the tenth to the 
twelfth grades improved until 25 per cent, was again 
reached; through college the readers improved slowly in 
discrimination, but graduate students scored 70 per cent." 
The improvement noted may be attributed to the dropping 
out of the poorer pupils, to the increasing excellence of the 
teaching, or to growing familiarity with the ideas and 
forms of poetry, or even with the selections included in 
the tests themselves. But for the deterioration from the 
seventh grade on, not made up before the junior or 
senior year in high school, it is conceivable that positively 
harmful methods of teaching such as Dr. Hosic describes 
may be in some measures accountable. 

DESIRABLE SIDE PATHS 

All this emphasis on ignoring minor issues, however, 
has perhaps pictured a sober progress down the middle 
of the high road which I am far from desiring to sug- 
gest. Dr. Crothers' proposals on the proper reading of 
poetry, beneath a hedge quite away from the main roads, 
on reading it ad libitum and not soberly straight through, 
are far nearer the mark of inculcating real literature. The 
teacher will gladly start, and will allow his pupils to start, 
excursions down enticing by-paths here and there. Only, 
he will see to it carefully that everything is related to the 
main issue, of true enhancement of experience, that every- 
thing too is in the key of the humane and not of the 
erudite and informing. Thus he will bring in what is 

20 That is, any one simply drawing the verses blindfold from a 
hat would get that many right in several thousand trials. S. L. 
31 The italics are mine. S. L. 



2 2o READING AND LITERATURE 

much more worthwhile than could be picked up by plod- 
ders in the highway. 22 

WHAT STUDY IS OF MOST WORTH 

I have gone at some length into this adversary's argu- 
ment because it must be very clear that, in the study of 
literature we shall hereafter counsel, there are several 
things we do not mean. Mr. Kerfoot, in his excellent 
book already referred to, has one most valuable section on 
the subject of one's own method in reading. The chief 
point may be restated briefly here : 23 It is that w^jnust 
learn to evaluate the stirrings of curiosity, of dislike, 
or of sympathy that we always feel in reading anything 
which appeals to us as real experience. We tend, on 
the contrary, prompted by sloth or by mere preoccupation 
with getting on, to neglect significant and important curi- 
osities. This necessarily means a limiting of interests 
and of life, so that we move constantly in a narrower 
circle, and never grow more mature or taste ex- 
perience more fully. It is equally clear, on the other 
hand, that many such interests as arise are irrelevant to 
our purposes in the reading of literature, or even are alto- 
gether worthless. These futile interests — in mere accu- 
mulation of facts, for instance — it is our business to put 
at their true worth and to neglect, while we value and 
develop to the full all that are of essential significance. 

Now, the literature class andjeachexand text are obvi- 
ously intended to help in precisely this, evaluation of curi- 
osities or interests. Most often, we have seen, literature 
teaching has busied itself wholly with supplying satisfac- 
tions for the random and unrelated curiosities of educated 
readers — desires existing, or supposed to exist, for Grad- 

22 S. M. Crothers: "The Enjoyment of Poetry" in The Gentle 
Reader (Boston, 1913). 

23 J. B. Kerfoot : How to Read, Chapter VI, pp. 174 ff. 



CLASS HELP IN LITERATURE 221 

grind facts and figures often of the most irrelevent sort. 
And so the net result has very frequently been a 
side-tracking of the whole process of literary enjoyment 
and understanding for a slow freight of information, 
which has often got the whole right of way and effectually 
prevented anything else from getting forward. There 
are in most live human beings such factual curiosities, 
legitimate enough. But few of them are in any essential 
way related to the business of literature. We need to lay 
a great many of these gently aside, and then try to find out 
what other stirrings of curiosity or interest, like or dislike, 
should be fed and determine what direction they should 
be given in intelligent reading. 

An essential curiosity which in the trained reader 
becomes a guide to literary appreciation and understand- 
ing is a major concern with what the writer is trying 
to do. 24 Obviously this is a query that should have 
right of way in the literature class. If this matter is 
neglected or misunderstood, no realization of the poem or 
drama or story can be expected. This chief concern Mr. 
Kerfoot discusses at length, with good examples, 25 for 
the reading of novels. We may illustrate it briefly: 
High-school pupils who attempt The Vicar of Wakefield 
or Silas Lapham are usually impatient of the slow and 
rather unimportant movement of the plot. If often seems 
to them poor or thin, and the author's interest appears 
constantly to stray into side-issues. They fail to realize 
that the author's concern in these stories is not to develop 
breath-catching and intricate plots, but to reveal human 
character and motive. Senior high-school pupils are old 
enough to have for themselves, under good guidance, a 
true and natural interest in studying people about them 

24 See pp. 65 ff., above. 

25 J. B. Kerfoot: "How to Read a Novel," Chapter VIII of How 
to Read. 



222 READING AND LITERATURE 

in everyday life. These interests — in one's own observing 
and in the characters of literature — supplement and feed 
one another. Keen observing of men and women in train 
or street car or department store, and appreciation of 
the sharper observing portrayed in the Spectator papers 
or Cranford and in Mr. Bennett's Old Wives' Tales, grow 
side by side. And only on such a basis can young people 
come to appreciation of the art of such modern poets 
as Mr. Robert Frost and such novelists as Jane Austen and 
George Meredith. When pupils are ready for this sort 
of experience in literature, we must clearly show them the 
difference in aim between these essays and novels and re- 
flective verse, and the narrative poetry or romances they 
have been reading. Only such a starting-out wall make 
possible their understanding and appreciation. Such 
discovery of the writer's purpose, in terms of their own 
pleasure in observing, is a good form of introduction, 
e must stir and feed curiosity as to the main purpose of 
the writer if we would enlarge our pupils' literary horizons 
by real experiences and enjoyments. 

The consideration of types of literature has already 
been discussed 26 as a mode of approaching this problem, 
and this is fundamental and necessary. But more is 
needed; for every poem or book there is presupposed an 
attitude of mind on the reader's part, as well as specific 
previous experience, and this mental attitude 27 we are 
under obligation to help insure. The chapter on "Back- 
grounds and Approaches" will further consider this 
problem. But it is one to be kept in mind throughout the 
class consideration of any piece of literature, because 
without it no criterion is available for testing many lesser 
curiosities that stir us and require evaluating. 

■ Pp. 65 ff. 

27 Pp. 172 ff. and 241 ff. 



\Y 



CLASS HELP IN LITERATURE 223 

A division which helps suggest the attitude of mind 
necessary to the reading of various types of literature is 
suggested by Professor W. S. Hinchman, of Haver- 
ford College. It consists of questioning whether the 
author is trying to: 

(1) Tell a story — merely that — as in Treasure 

Island or Kidnapped. 

(2) Paint pictures, as in Mr. Hardy's Under the 

Greenwood Tree, Stevenson's Travels with 
a Donkey, or Keats' The Eve of St. Agnes. 

(3) Reveal or develop character, as notably 

with George Eliot, or in Mr. Bennett's 
Five Towns novels or Shakespeare's 
Julius Ccesar. 

(4) Show a social situation — the relations 

among people in larger or smaller 
groups, as Mr. W. L. George does in 
Blind Alley, or Mr. Shaw in Misalliance 
or Mr. Galsworthy in The Patricians. 

(5) Show forth truly the motives and the results 

of thought and mood and action, as in 
Adam Bede or Richard Fever el or Tess of 
the d'TJrbevillesP 

Of course these divisions are not intended to be definitely 
exclusive; almost any piece of writing does more than 
one of these things in some degree. But the scheme is 
easily fitted to the study of most sorts of poetry or prose, 
and is a notable clarifier of view on the part of pupils 
who have always known and sought but one kind of 
writing and have judged by its standard all books 
they met. 

28 Professor Hinchman's phrasing of this last is "point a moral" — 
expressing rightly enough his meaning, but liable to misinterpreta- 
tion, perhaps. 



224 READING AND LITERATURE 

" IMAGES AND IDEAS " 

A definite division 29 runs through the whole realm of 
literature and helps specifically in essential understanding 
of books on either side of its line. Those writings which 
purely tell a story or present sense-experience, in the manner 
of Stevenson's romances and accounts of travel — divisions 
i and 2 of Mr. Hinchman's scheme, above — are chiefly 
busied with first-hand perceivable matters, and little, or 
not at all, with interpretations of experience. They 
make up a great body of " objective " stories, letters, and 
sketches of life and manners. They have no concern with 
anything beyond suggesting to their reader new or famil- 
iar matter which his senses can apprehend, for his enjoy- 
ment and for increasing his contact with life. 
\f But the literature which deals with interpretations of 
experience is more common, because the poet or novelist 
is rarely content to give us merely what his senses have 
perceived; he wants to tell us what he makes of it. And 
in the measure that he is a person of individual and real 
thought, like Thoreau or George Meredith, we are glad 
to have also his interpretations. The genial asides and 
comments of Thackeray form certainly a most distinctive 
and, for those not impatiently hot in pursuit of the thread 
of story, a delightful part of his novels. We are little 
interested usually in Isaac Walton's varieties of bait, but 
much pleased with the " kind of picture of my own dis- 
position" which was what he really set out to present. 

Most writers are concerned with the revelation of 
character in action, with the effects of people on one an- 
other's moods and destinies, with the consequences of 
great social movements like war and of organized insti- 
tutions such as marriage and trade and law courts and 

39 This useful distinction has been traced by Professor Baldwin 
to Renard's Method e Scientifique de I'Histoire Litter aire, where it is 
attributed to Balzac; see C. S. Baldwin: A College Manual of 
Rhetoric (Longmans, 1902, ed.), P- 88. 



CLASS HELP IN LITERATURE 225 

prisons. They select what shows, in sharp relief, charac- 
ter or mood or some other acting force and its long and 
deep ramifications in effect. And almost always, whether 
or not they state it in so many words, they have derived 
some conclusions which we can trace. Often the artist 
leaves this for the incidents he records to state for him ; if 
everything is shaped to that end he does not need to set it 
down. Or he may express it incidentally, as Meredith in 
Richard Feverel sums up the fatal misconception of Sir 
Austin : "If immeasurable love were perfect wisdom, 
one human being might almost impersonate Providence to 
another." 30 If the writer does it thus better than we can 
do, we are grateful to him. 

In any case, most narrative poems or fictions are writ- 
ten not for story or pictures and other sensory material, 
but for the revelation of character or social situation that 
these carry. And it is our business, in assessing the 
author's purpose, to discover what we suppose to be his 
conclusion about the matter. This may be very simple, as 
when we find that the wholesome and reconstructive in- 
fluence of a little child is the basic idea of Silas Marner, 
or that the contrast of real and cold giving lies at the center 
of The Vision of Sir Launfal. Or the idea may be ex- 
tremely tenuous and difficult to seize. We have already 
noted the necessity of finding such basic unity in orations 
and essays. The usual trouble here has been preoccupation 
with small details — with sentences or word-definitions or 
with paragraphs, or with minor points established. To 
try to work out the detailed logical structure for an essay 
by Emerson or Carlyle is a huge and unrewarding task; 
their intricacy defies such analysis. But the fundamental 
idea of Self Reliance or of The Hero as Poet can be simply 
discovered and stated, and thus an understanding of it 
be assured. 

30 Chapter IV; see also Chapter XXXIII, "Nursing the Devil." 
15 



226 READING AND LITERATURE 

Such examination of a lyric poem or ode is of course 
even more likely to be dissection and destruction than per- 
ception. But if we discover what the author is trying to 
do we can usually come to view with some clarity the basic 
impression of the whole: whether he is painting pictures 
as in the Ode on a Grecian Urn; or suggesting impres- 
sions for all our senses, as in The Ancient Mariner; or 
tracing influences upon character, as in Wordsworth's 
Intimations of Immortality, or ''showing a social situation" 
as in Moody's Gloucester Moor or Schauffler's Scum o' 
the Earth. 

But it can hardly be stated too often that no con- 
ventional and formal " pointing of moral " is for a mo- 
ment considered here as a function of literature. Insistence 
on the final quatrain of The Ancient Mariner rather than 
its amazing, varied pictures, or on the tacked-on last 
lines of Thanatopsis, as though these conventional orna- 
ments were the center and origin of the poems, cannot 
be too strongly condemned. The " bad luck," or moral 
obliquity "of killing a goose," in Southey's sarcastic 
phrase, does not come near to being the center of Cole- 
ridge's poem, which is far more concerned with color, 
atmosphere, and mental impressions than with any con- 
clusion about them; and Bryant's beautiful lines about 
the finality and natural beauty of death do not keep even 
intelligent company with the final stanza which his Puritan 
middle age added to a wholly Greek poem. If any 
" moral " attaches to a piece of genuine literature, it is 
because the reader is unable to escape the conclusion which 
comes out of every real experience such as the story or 
poem has led him to share. This moral idea oftenest is not 
stated, and we generally do wrong, I believe, to require 
its formulation by our pupils. To sumjugjthe_£^l^. 
conception of a piece of literature without moralizing at 
all about it— -that is, without stating or dilating upon any- 



CLASS HELP IN LITERATURE 227 

one's right or duty in the light of it — is the plain re- 
quirement of the teaching of literary work. 

ESSENTIAL CONSIDERATION OF STRUCTURE 

The usual study of plot organization and development, 
on the lines of the Freytag drama-triangle or by means of 
analyzing plots and sub-plots, is no subject for high- 
school classes. Whatever study of structure is attempted 
should be simplified and directed upon the question which 
we have proposed as to central idea and purpose. To 
work out the core of idea in a novel or play, it is of value 
to find out the array of opposing forces whose clash makes 
up the essential plot structure. In Julius Ccesar, for ex- 
ample, it is quite possible for pupils in eighth or ninth grade 
to align the forces for and against the conspirators, and 
discuss precisely what bearing each had on the issue. Their 
conclusions will depend largely on their idea of Brutus' 
character, whether they regard him as the high and noble 
hero of a lost cause ; or a self -deceived and mistaken, but 
sincere patriot, unhappily influenced by Cassius ; or merely 
a poseur and demagogue. This is fundamental because our 
conception of the main point of the play grows out of our 
attitude toward Brutus. Pupils should be free to form 
their own opinion here, and back it by citation of specific 
passages of the play, as for example the influence of the 
anonymous letters in Act II and the whole discussion of 
Portia's death in Act IV. Study of the play that is cen- 
tered largely on this question will be no perfunctory 
reading, but a real search for the central idea built about 
the characters portrayed and the incidents related. Such 
attempt to discover a basic conception in what is read 
brings to a focus the realization of individual scenes and 
produces a single impression. This is obviously of 
primary importance in the study of literature. 

One class hour in an eighth grade recently was spent 



228 READING AND LITERATURE 

in noting the forces for and against the conspirators in 
Julius Ccesar; it resulted in these discoveries : It is hardly 
possible to put any one character in the play altogether on 
one side or the other. This difference from the characteri- 
zation in the hero-and-villain tale is one of the evidences of 
truth and reality in literature. Brutus was of vital im- 
portance to the conspiracy, but his obstinate and over- 
riding counsel, however we account for it, led to sparing 
Marc Antony, permitting him to speak to the mob, and 
thus wrecking the entire enterprise. Cassius was the 
originator and fierce moving spirit of the plot; but his 
yielding to Brutus worked against his cause, and his dis- 
honesty finally divided the conspirators' councils. 

On the other hand, the impression that Caesar him- 
self produces in life is unfavorable to his cause. As the 
class expressed it, he was a " sort of Kaiser," desiring 
nobody about him who thought much, and boasting of 
his obstinacy of mind. Many believed that he was actu- 
ally superstitious and afraid, as well as deaf and sickly, 
but blustered of his fearlessness. Nevertheless, sympathy 
is called forth by his fall, and is intensified to mighty 
force by Antony, and thereafter his spirit marches tri- 
umphantly forward to Philippi with a strength he did not 
show when alive. 

Thus the pupils answered for themselves the question 
they had several times raised: Why call the play after 
Caesar when he dies before the middle of it? 31 And they 
succeeded in aligning the forces of the play, with a cumu- 
lative, apparently overwhelming success for the con- 
spirators up to the point of clash and thereafter a steady 
procedure to triumph by the forces for Caesar. So were 
furnished all necessary data for comprehending the unity 

81 It is not amiss to tell them, of course, that as a matter of fact 
the name of the play probably was chosen rather because the 
London audience knew about Caesar, and not about Brutus. 



CLASS HELP IN LITERATURE 229 

of idea in the play, the clash and resultant of its forces. 
This provides a method for working out the fundamental 
structure of any other narrative with plot. Such study 
should go no further, I think, into the question of con- 
struction. Enough is here provided to ensure rounding 
into a single clean impression the vivid experiences found 
in reading individual scenes. 32 

SIDE-PATHS TO BE IGNORED 

If we use this criterion, of essential relation to realizing 
the purpose and central idea, to test any teaching proced- 
ure, our own or one that we observe, we note at once the 
stress of temptation, to which every teacher is likely to 
yield, to bring in related unessential matters that take 
one's fancy and seem to him of possible use. In the 
finished and thorough study of Andrea del Sarto reported 
by Professor Fairchild from a high school class, 33 analysis 
of the details seems to me to disclose some such turning 
into side-paths. The whole study is directed to realization 
of the scene and incident and is shaped rightly to a com- 
prehension of Andrea's character. The discussion of 
aspects of his nature as portrayed in various lines of the 
poem itself is an excellent piece of work as driving straight 
at the essential idea. I think the attention to technique — 
as in the treatment of the lines beginning "A common 
grayness silvers everything " — not forced for at least the 
better and more mature students in the class. 

Yet is it not probable that proportion could have been 
better maintained, and a possibly over-long attention to 
the poem for high-school pupils avoided, by elimination of 

23 F. T. Baker in The Teaching of English by Carpenter, Baker, 
and Scott, pp. 167, 172, 176, 181, 267 ; H. G. Paul, " Study of the 
Drama" in the Illinois Bulletin (8: No. 7), April, 1916; and 
Dr. Brander Matthews' invaluable Study of the Drama. Other 
references are to be found in the bibliography for Chapter 10, 
Appendix I, pp. 367, ff. 

83 A. H. R. Fairchild : The Teaching of Poetry, pp. 22-69. 



2 3 o READING AND LITERATURE 

considerable matter of interest mainly to the teacher her- 
self? I cannot justify the dragging-in of information 
about Kenyon and his bequest and picture commission. 
This sort of gossipy data about the occasion of the poem 
seems purely erudite and unrelated to the main problem. 
And the long quotations from Vasari and Symonds, also, 
present matters which the class could without difficulty 
have found in the poem itself. Reading them to the pupils 
appears disproportionate. I criticize thus an excellent les- 
son — few high school teachers could handle Andrea del 
Sarto as fitly for the understanding and appreciation of 
their pupils — simply to get a specific case for clear appli- 
cation of the criteria I propose. There is no question that 
the total effect of one's teaching depends upon unswerv- 
ing adaptation of every means to the one end: our 
pupils' realization of scenes and incidents as contributing 
to a main purpose — here the character delineation of 
the painter. 

STUDY OF TECHNIQUE 

Precisely the same thing is to be said of any attention 
to the artist's technical skill. We have said that th e atti- 
tude^oL understanding and appreciation in literature or 
any art must be that of re-creating, not of critical analysis. 
That a sort of analysis is essential to such re-creation is 
clear; but a much more proportioned distribution of 
emphasis, a much less conscious detection of effects than 
may be useful in actual writing, is essential to under- 
standing and appreciation. I remember a keen disap- 
pointment and sense of disillusion from having pointed 
out to me the tricks by which Poe creates a sense of deso- 
late horror in the House of Usher, and the artifices which 
Kipling uses in his Indian tales. I believe it is no part of 
our business to expose these wires and pulleys. We need 
to remember that we are working, not for the one in a 



CLASS HELP IN LITERATURE 231 

hundred who will become a literary artist anyhow, but 
for the ninety-nine who will always simply enjoy what 
they can comprehend and appreciate. Their wits may be 
well sharpened to detect the more obvious tricks of the 
writer of cheap detective fiction or weak emotional verse 
or stories, so that they shall require less palpable artifices ; 
but they need not, I think, be taught to examine and ex- 
claim at euphonies and rhythms ; they can feel them better 
without that sort of attention. A lightly passing mention 
of the difference between the swing of galloping verse 
and the quiet movement of Andrea del Sarto or To a 
Waterfowl may mean something and be worth our while ; 
any more analysis of means, save in the special cases of 
helping to actual creation, 34 is most probably a wasteful 
scattering of emphasis. 

THE FOUNDATION OF GENUINE EXPERIENCE 

I am unwilling to close this chapter without a recur- 
rence to the basic idea which underlies it, and which it will 
be particularly the business of the following chapters to 
illustrate concretely. Beneath all this necessity of getting 
at the author's purpose and his central idea or unifying 
conception lies the requirement that the sense-experiences 
which he presents be clearly realized as they are unfolded 
in his pages. We shall make all possible use of illustrated 
editions, historical prints, trips to armor and costume 
rooms in museums, reading other stories of medieval 
times to make vivid and real the scenes of Ivanhoe and 
Quentin Durward. But we shall beware of trying to 
induce realization by the cramping process of demand- 
ing definitions of word-meanings or analysis of gram- 
matical structures, as though these insured or much 
aided realization. 

34 See Chapter IX. 



232 READING AND LITERATURE 

APPREHENSION THROUGH REALIZATION 

Without this possession of experience with his senses 
no reader can achieve realization of the ideas, and par- 
ticularly of the fundamental idea and purpose, of what he 
reads. To take attention off this main business of realiza- 
tion for acquiring any technique or information what- 
ever certainly destroys the possibility of enhancement of 
experience for which literature is created. Moreover, to 
attempt any statement or inculcation of the idea or thought 
of a book before the linked individual experiences are 
clearly realized is altogether futile. It is an attempt to 
reverse the whole order of thought. In particular, we 
need to help pupils in seeing color, as in the nocturne in 
white and black and crimson when the Ancient Mariner's 
vessel returns to the harbor; we need to make them con- 
scious of the odor of plowed lands or of drying fish; of 
the look and taste of "lucent syrops tinct with cinna- 
mon " ; of the cry of gulls or the chorus of chantymen. 
For this purpose we shall have often to seek comparisons 
in their own experience which will help them realize new 
ones. 35 Here the really social class in literature, where 
each one illustrates and makes details vivid for the rest 
by bringing in his own share of adventure and of percep- 
tion, is superior to the best individual reading. It is this 
value chiefly that justifies recitations in literature; they 
should never be drills in understanding what is read 
through auxiliary aids like grammar and word-study, but 
really social interchange of experience, to the end of greater 
realization and finer, deeper living. 

Two misdirections of teaching energy — emphasis on 
unrelated matters and attempts to short-circuit the process 
and do without basic sensory experience — are, I believe, 
responsible for the greater part of our failures in teaching 

35 C. S. Thomas : The Teaching of English in Secondary Schools. 
pp. 157 ff- 



CLASS HELP IN LITERATURE 233 

literature. We need greatly to cultivate lightness and 
deftness of touch, restraint of our impulses to drag in — to 
us — interesting but unnecessary matters, and resolute con- 
centration on the main issue. When we have the chief good 
of a piece of literature in hand, we need courageous com- 
mon sense to let well enough alone. We should then drop 
Sir Launfal without further analysis, or The Merchant of 
Venice without more discussion of its plots, sub-plots, and 
counter-plots, and go to other writing for further enlarge- 
ment and deepening of our pupils' experience. We may 
well hope that they will come back to these books again, 
when they have grown up, for more thoroughgoing study 
and appreciation of finer aspects of craftsmanship or 
subtleties of idea. We have the better assurance of this 
if we do not attempt to squeeze the books dry of meaning 
at once. 36 For older pupils who attempt, usually in 
elective courses, to write small plays or short-stories or 
verse, excellent use may be made of attention to rhythm 
and structure and euphony of wording. Given such a 
genuine purpose, technique is really something worth atten- 
tion. Without this, it is probably futile and even harmful 
misdirection of energy to give it much heed. 

MEMORIZING 

Memorizing is so constantly emphasized, and it is, in 
fact, so great a source of pleasure to us when we now 
recall bits of beautiful verse we have learned, that we 
should consider its claim to place as an essential require- 
ment of the literature course. I believe that we should 
manage to secure considerable memorizing by our pupils. 
Many teachers frankly assign this as part of the business 
of studying a lyric or the excellent passages of longer 
poems or prose. And for the better pupils who find this 

39 Quiller-Couch : On the Art of Reading, pp. 69-76 and 228 ff., 
discusses well the place of " reserved delights." 



234 READING AND LITERATURE 

no great difficulty, and who have naturally keen and 
broad appreciations, this may be not hardship but pleas- 
ure. I suspect, however, that the great majority of any 
class resent it, do it as poorly as they are permitted, and 
carry away little else in memory but a sense of hateful 
taskwork. I may of course be quite mistaken about this ; 
but I offer very tentatively my own preferred procedure : 
I like to secure the most possible memorizing through 
giving extra credit in grades, and usually by discovering 
real situations like assembly programs and small plays for 
which memorizing excellent matter is the most suitable 
preparation. But above all, I try to develop so sharp a 
realization of the sense and beauty of poems and verses 
that pupils return to them repeatedly, read excellent pas- 
sages again and again, and thus unconsciously learn 
them. One may not get a very large total of lines mem- 
orized in this fashion during a poor or even an average 
pupil's school time ; but I believe that it is possible to help 
him gain quite as much sense of the excellence of literature, 
and perhaps even more enduring and pleasant memories 
of the experience of reading and living in it. 

Most excellent results in memorizing have been se- 
cured in the Madison, Wisconsin, High School, under the 
leadership of Miss Mary Hargrave, by means of a memory 
contest in poetry after the analogy of a music memory con- 
test annually held in the town. Twenty-eight poems 
were selected, with the help of the senior class, from those 
read during the English course, and the competition was 
in recognizing over forty selections from these poems. 
Great interest was developed, and some excellent scores 
were made. 

Where memorizing is requisite, as for plays or as- 
sembly programs, it is of course most valuable to give 
pupils some idea of method. For a few verses, at least, 
reading as a whole is indisputably better than the old- 



CLASS HELP IN LITERATURE 235 

fashioned line-by-line drilling. Reading several times 
just before going to bed, and again several times in the 
morning, is an effectual and pleasant way to master such 
matter. For committing to memory longer pieces of lit- 
erature — and this will be extremely rare, as for a Shake- 
speare play — after numerous readings to get the sense of 
the whole, it is essential to take it piece by piece and mem- 
orize each, tying it in thoroughly with all that has been 
learned before. 

It may be noted also that children of the junior high- 
school age, or the years before age sixteen, are rather 
noticeably readier and surer in memorizing than in later 
years. Advantage may be taken of this fact to master 
then especially fine matter fitted to the understanding of 
pupils. Assignments should obviously be widely indi- 
vidual; provided it offers very free election, both on a 
broad recommended list and outside it, a minimum re- 
quirement may perhaps be justified. 

THE CONTINUANCE OF BOOK CLUBS 

We have noted that most children in a system of free 
selections and occasional study all together, as in the 
book clubs, read through their own choice the major part 
of such lists as the college entrance requirements. It 
seems reasonable to suppose that where pupils have the 
equipment of reading ability and of experience to under- 
stand these books, such a normal approach is likely to 
prove the most satisfactory. They then view a piece of 
literature as a natural and possibly rewarding new ex- 
perience, as you and I do a new book by Arnold Bennett 
or Joseph Conrad — far more naturally than to enter it 
through a critical introduction and to attempt its mastery 
by means of notes and dictionary study. There should 
of course be class study, not only of types of books like 
the drama or novel, on which pupils need additional help 



236 READING AND LITERATURE 

for rounding out a complete impression, but of such diffi- 
cult literature as a first Shakespeare comedy or a Greek 
epic and its background of fable. Such free and pleasant 
reading — not in any case lazy and dawdling, but alert and 
creative in spirit — should, I believe, be the literature work 
of all but possibly the last year or two of high school. 

ON KEEPING BOOK LISTS 

It is important that lists of individual reading be kept, 
and children enjoy keeping them. Their discussions as 
they fill them out aid in circulating books that they 
like. Such lists may often be cards on which a brief com- 
ment on each book is chronicled. It is clearly of value to 
the pupil himself that he record at least two or three 
sentences of his impressions from any book that is worth 
reading at all. And such lists or cards are of the greatest 
importance, both for the guidance of pupils who are 
looking for a book to read, and for the teacher himself 
in making out his lists for a new term. Mr. Blandford 
Jennings, of the English department at Ironwood, Michi- 
gan, High School, has tried having pupils write "promo- 
tive" book-notes like those in the "monthly releases" of 
new records of the best sort of music in the various 
phonograph companies* catalogs; he has secured interest- 
ing results. The sort of comment that is worth keeping, 
and various examples from different school grades, are re- 
corded later. 37 

ORGANIZED STUDY OF LITERATURE 

There is one final result which the high school litera- 
ture class should certainly try to accomplish: it should 
bring to point and ordered meaning so much as possible of 

37 Chapter IX, pp. 262 ff. See also Allan Abbott : An Experi- 
ment in High-School English, School Review (12:550), September, 
1904, a most significant and helpful article. 



CLASS HELP IN LITERATURE 237 

the range of books which pupils have read or touched 
upon. This may be accomplished in some sort of viewing 
and reviewing, in chronological order or grouped by lit- 
erary periods, of such masterpieces of English and 
American literature as young people in the last years 
of high school can fruitfully realize. Obviously, however, 
this must be more than the conventional memorization of 
names and works and dates. And it can be more even 
than a reviewing in time sequence of great writings, iso- 
lated or rather arbitrarily classified. It may be a pleasant 
browsing among such books as each pupil is capable of 
apprehending. Or, again, it may be an exploration among 
the best of our English writings to discover the ideals of 
individual, social, and national life which have informed 
these enduring works. A course united about such con- 
ception may go back to Chaucer's parson and to Piers 
Plowman, or yet farther, to discover the emergence of 
ideals of liberty and responsibility, of justice and oppor- 
tunity for best development. The presentations and inter- 
pretations of most great writers show throughout an 
adherence to kindred ideals. There has been always 
protest, voiced in various ways in each age, against 
tyranny and privilege, against narrowness and prejudice. 
And there has been no lack of courageous demonstration 
of our failures to realize our best ideals, from 
Milton's sounding verse to Mr. Galsworthy's Justice and 
The Mob. Whatever of sectionalism and local idea our 
pupils may have found now and again in British or New 
England or Southern writers, they can now discover the 
fundamental, compelling unity of ideas throughout all our 
greatest literature. 

Some such conception of the glorious tradition that 
has come down to us from the discontent of the Plowman 
and the martyr zeal of the Lollards is a revelation and 
inspiration. The last year or two of the high school 



238 READING AND LITERATURE 

course can well be directed to unfolding this panorama 
before our pupils, best through their own discoveries in 
the course of exploration and discussion. It contains 
more than can be embodied in any book of selections, 
though such books are most useful. 38 It requires, certainly, 
broad reading and earnest purpose and breadth of mind 
on the teacher's part which are a challenge to his scholar- 
ship and his ambition to make his work good. If he is 
capable of some measure of this contribution he can do 
more than in any other way to make possible the realiza- 
tion of English literature as a development and in vital 
sense a unity. The contrast between this and a course in 
literary history or a survey of major writings in merely 
time order is obvious. It requires more effort, but it can 
also give far richer reward. 

And it must not be conducted in isolation from the 
world-wide evolution of the like interpretations of men's 
experience, in Greek and other literatures. If we are to 
contribute to a great and true Americanization of our 
alien peoples, we must not alone present American shib- 
boleths and beliefs; we must master patiently and thor- 
oughly all of thought and experience, of art and custom 
and ideal, that the immigrants bring us. If we are to 
teach an appreciation of our highest literary works we 
must show them as part of the florescence of human 
thought and aspiration all over the world. So we may 
be able to teach a patriotism and devotion that are not 
narrow, but world-wide, capable of nourishing a growth 
into really international understanding and sympathy. 
The possibilities of the teaching of literature are as broad 
as mankind and as high as the loftiest human aspirations 
and beliefs. They are limited only by the capabilities in 

38 A most interesting collection of this sort of material, invalu- 
able for the teacher's own use and guidance, is Greenlaw and Haiir 
ford's .The Great Tradition (Scott Foresman, 1919). .* 



CLASS HELP IN LITERATURE 239 

breadth and reach of the teacher's mind and spirit. But 
all this is likely to represent rather the scholar's than the 
school pupil's normal interest. It should certainly not be 
too thoroughly or soberly attempted, nor conducted as 
propaganda and doctrine. 

IN SUMMARY 

Whatever is done in the literature class should be 
directed to a mastery of real and rounded experience. 
(1) Whatever contributes to sensing aspects of life as 
they are presented is so much gain for our chief purposes 
in teaching literature. (2) Whatever, further, leads to 
realizing the author's purpose and his central or unifying 
idea, in story or drama, essay or poem, brings home with 
fulness and clarity the one contribution which the piece 
of literature may be expected to make to 'the reader's 
command of his own experience. All else, all that is of 
even doubtful value for these purposes, no matter what 
its value as scientific information or as technical skill, 
is beside our main issue and suspect of unwarrantable in- 
trusion. We must apply our criteria rigorously, so that 
we shall keep ourselves and our prepossessions out of our 
pupils' way and allow them to get all that they are indi- 
vidually capable of getting from the literature we 
read together. 

Where young people have a reasonably intelligent 
method of reading, we shall do well to let them have ample 
time, counted as literature assignments, to browse among 
excellent libraries and select such books as appeal to them 
and feed their interests. Our readings together must make 
sure a knowledge of fundamentally valuable classics, estab- 
lish a method for getting the best out of various books and 
types of writing, and set standards of taste that are experi- 
mental, and not merely legislated and demanded. With 
this equipment we can leave pupils largely free to get their 



2 4 o READING AND LITERATURE 

own sort of values out of the reading matter that crowds 
upon their attention, sifting and trying, and reading rather 
for pleasant adventure than for any conscious purpose. In 
the measure that we make them ready for this, we have suc- 
ceeded in our atempts to teach literature. For this is 
what they will all do, in feeble or in excellent fashion, 
when they have passed out of our school rooms into the 
workshops and studies, the libraries and open fields of 
adult life. 



CHAPTER VIII 
BACKGROUNDS AND APPROACHES 

As we have already noted, 1 modern psychology sug- 
gests that one's " mind set "or mental attitude toward a 
piece of work is often of more determining significance 
than the help of any method or procedure in doing it. That 
is, whether one dislikes or likes doing a thing, what his 
purpose is in doing it, and the resulting distribution of 
his attention and his energy furnish both the motive force 
and the guidance for his work. The equipment of ideas 
and of feelings with which one approaches the reading of 
a book contributes more than all else to what he gets from 
it. To a reader without the necessary preparation for 
experiencing it the greatest literature is relatively poor 
and meaningless. This is the chief meaning of the defini- 
tion of a classic as "a pleasure unseasonably hurried into." 
With a rich equipment of experience and a wholesome 
spirit of adventure in living we find measurably fine any 
honest attempt to portray life; it need only be fair and 
clear-seeing in its presentation of truth. 

If our mental furnishings and the spirit with which we 
approach a book are really thus important, we need to pay 
greater attention to them in literature classes. As we have 
noted, a printed book is like printed music ; both have to 
be reconstructed with the powers of experience at the 
reader's command, with what he has taken in through 
his five or seven senses, and with what ideas his mind has 
made out of these data. /A first problem of teaching litera- 
ture, then, is so to relate the experiences in books to actual 
experiences in pupils' lives that they may be realized. 

1 Pp. 172 ff. 

16 241 



242 READING AND LITERATURE 

DISTINGUISHING BETWEEN TRUE AND FALSE 

INTRODUCTIONS 

This does not mean, however, that our pupils always 
require considerable introductory matter before they ap- 
proach a book. There is a too common preliminary process 
by which the teacher attempts, usually by abstractions and 
explanation or by futile, enthusiastic descriptions, to fur- 
nish pupils with requisite experience ready-made. Unless 
the introduction is in some degree a work of art, like the 
literature itself, the desired effect simply is not possible. 
If it is to be realized, the teacher's or the editor's account 
has to be reconstructed by reader or hearer in precisely 
the same way as the book itself has to be recreated. But 
the typical introduction is often as far removed from any 
quality of vivid reality as other abstract and inferior talk 
or writing. I have heard teachers, for example, enthusi- 
astically praising the beauty of English primroses under 
a hedge, or of daffodils in spring, or of the nightingale's 
song, under the delusion that they were making possible 
to their children such a heightened appreciation of 
Wordsworth as they had themselves enjoyed through 
visiting the lake country. Sometimes a teacher succeeds 
thus in stirring a sort of warmed-over enthusiasm, and 
he may then suppose that he has achieved a broadening of 
experience for his pupils. In most if not all cases he 
has in fact simply produced either boredom or the same 
meaningless emotional fluster about which we have com- 
plained in the works of briefly favorite sentimentalist 
writers. This kind of futility merely demonstrates the 
teacher's inadequate understanding of the nature and pur- 
pose of literature and his dulness of touch with the mental 
processes of his class. Mr. Hayward makes interesting 
suggestions about providing an attitude of expectancy 
and readiness for appreciation before introducing a great 



BACKGROUNDS, APPROACHES 243 

poem to children. 2 In the majority of schoolrooms this 
results in a merely turgid and futilely stirring approach. 
For the most part a simple and natural discovery of a 
piece of good literature is preferable to any emotional 
appeal or any general explanation and information about 
it beforehand. 

THE BROADENING OF FIRST-HAND EXPERIENCE 

An unusual teacher of fine arts defined in some such 
way as this her ideal of a course in her subject : It should 
consist of a trip around the world; it should include camp- 
ing out in red-wood forests, at the edges of glaciers, and 
in tropical regions. It should provide every possible 
variety of observation of things and people, customs and 
activities. It should give opportunity for seeing every 
sort of attempt at artistic creation, from stone-age draw- 
ings to Greek marbles, Renaissance and current paintings, 
and decorative design. 

A similar broadening of pupils' real experiences is es- 
sential to helping them to a genuine understanding of lit- 
erature. The teacher who tries to arouse appreciation of 
a description of English landscape by a fervid commentary 
on how " lovely " it is has merely added " more words 
about words ". He has no more stirred real perception 
than the usual print or photograph " the color of axle- 
grease " reproduces a painting by Raphael. 3 Until teach- 
ers of literature recognize what experience actually is and 
how it is constituted, much of their classroom instruction 
and lecturing will limit rather than broaden the perceptions 
of their children. But in the degree that a teacher suc- 
ceeds in opening his pupils' senses, by casual comment and 
unforced sharing of enjoyment, to see color and move- 
ment and interesting, characteristic action about them, he 

a F. S. Hayward: The Lesson in Appreciation, Chapters I, II, 
and IV. 

3 Floyd Dell : Were You Ever a Child?, Chapters XVI and XVII. 



244 READING AND LITERATURE 

has made genuine literary understanding and apprecia- 
tion more possible to them. The art teacher whose ideas 
are quoted above once looked from my classroom window 
upon a bare clay field about a weed-grown pond; she re- 
marked, " Lots of good color in that foreground." I saw 
that color for the first time ; and I saw not only that, but 
many landscapes thereafter, with new understanding. 
The color had been there right along, but I had been un- 
able to see it. In the same way Edwin Clay hanger's friend 
the architect by offhand, specific comment opened the 
boy's eyes to beauty in buildings that he had never rightly 
seen before, and to the rich color in the smoke above the 
Five Towns.* 

We can encourage our pupils thus by good example 
of perception and by terse, descriptive comment to live with 
their senses more awake. They may note the glowing 
smoke and steam from engines passing in the night with 
fire-doors open. They may see more keenly the revelation 
of motive or character in an abashed, furtive glance or a 
habitually deprecating gesture. We can help them, as 
literature does, to use all their senses for definitely pur- 
poseful observation, and so much the more to understand 
and appreciate both letters and life. The reading of 
masterpieces in formal classrooms under formal instruc- 
tion and comment is a sad substitute for real reading in the 
fields or by the fire, and even this, as Stevenson says, is 
" a mighty bloodless substitute for life." We and our 
pupils need to store up as much as possible of really whole- 
some first-hand experience which can be imported into 
our classrooms. 

When city children to-day read Snowbound or Silas 
Marner, it requires all the variety of experience in the 
entire group — specific observing of sights and sounds and 
country odors — to create in each one the illusion of actu- 

4 Arnold Bennett: Clayhanger, Chapter XIV, 'The Architect." 



BACKGROUNDS, APPROACHES 245 

ality in the lines. Here is one advantage of class over 
solitary reading. One child has seen a well-sweep, an- 
other a cattle barn with pole stanchions or an old fire- 
place with crane and trammels. They can diagram these 
things rudely on the board to help the others. Or several 
have observed solitary and eccentric persons and can help 
to build a composite picture of an unsocial miser. Where 
their experience is a blank, or inadequate or misleading, 
the teacher will contribute an essential detail here and 
there to fill in the perception of scenes and incidents. And 
in the free contribution and interchange established he has 
always much opportunity to see what is actually going on 
in the pupils' minds. 

Direct experience with all one's senses is needed for 
fullest understanding of great literature. Few children 
have any perception of the taste of " syrops tinct with 
cinnamon." The viol and " serpent " and " hautboy," 
unknown to most pupils or unrecognized, sound all 
through our English writings. For realizing many a 
scene in drama and poem and story the music of country- 
dances and folk songs and ballads is necessary. Only 
as we can send our pupils out to find, or can bring to 
them, in pictures and music, a store of actual, basic sense- 
experiences, can we equip them to gain much that litera- 
ture has for them. We can never gain much by telling 
them about experiences which they lack the material for 
building up. 

It cannot be too definitely stated that this means not a 
constant and minute study of details, nor yet an attempt 
to furnish experience ready-made where it has been lack- 
ing, but chiefly a getting from the group itself whatever 
concrete and specific details of experience the children 
have in their store, and putting these before them in 
realizable fashion. Of course the teacher will share 
in this contribution : where experience is lacking alto- 



246 READING AND LITERATURE 

gether it is his business to furnish it if he can, and to do 
this in specific fashion, often by means of pictures, 
museum trips, concerts, and the like supplying of apt and 
concrete details. Where folk dances and interpretive 
dances can be taught, great gains are possible in apprecia- 
tion of, for example, the jig-music of the Elizabethan 
comedies and tragedies, and the morris-dances of the 
festivals. Good phonograph records are of value. Consid- 
erable help of these sorts may well be invoked to make easy 
and natural the approach to reality through books. As 
Professor Abbott once suggested, all this points toward 
making the English teacher into a sort of amateur vaude- 
ville artist. Here again, the teacher must resist sensibly 
the temptation of going too far. 

If he is to help in real re-creation of living adventure, 
the teacher has need particularly to avoid substituting gen- 
eralization and vague enthusiasm for reality. Where it is 
impossible for him to supplement in specific fashion a 
picturing or hearing of what literature suggests — of prime- 
roses or of storms at sea, for instance — he will best, per- 
haps, decide to< say nothing. A repression of exuberant 
appreciation is perhaps as often demanded of teachers 
as any other contribution to their successful work. Real 
appreciation is simply the inevitable result of real expe- 
rience of what touches people's lives closely. We may 
only select what we judge capable of such closeness to our 
pupils and aid in its specific realization ; at that point our 
business with appreciation wisely and properly ends. 

WHERE TEXT-BOOK INTRODUCTIONS ARE DISPENSABLE 

Comparatively few books are better for an introduc- 
tion, and few or none for the introductions usually found 
in school texts and schoolrooms. For the average text 
writer and teacher appear to suppose, contrary to the 
facts of actual experience, that the attitude of the reader 



BACKGROUNDS, APPROACHES 7 

of literature should be critical rather than re-creative. 
And so they deal in information about sources and author- 
ship and literary influences, editions and dates. All 
this has no relation with and makes no contribution to 
the experiencing of the story or poem itself, but merely 
gets in the way. When the question of introduction ob- 
trudes itself, had we not better decide often to allow our 
pupils what we have ourselves keenly enjoyed — the pleas- 
ure of simply casting oneself into a book as among 
unknown possibilities of delight and poignant adventure, 
without the intrusion of anyone to analyse it ahead of us, 
to point out this or the other beauty, or to speak of the 
florescence or decadence of an influence? Perhaps the 
fascination of current literature is due in part to the fact 
that young people are free to' come at it directly, without 
having to push aside centuries of commentary overgrow- 
ing it. 

This of course takes for granted the possession of 
apposite experience and assumes a pleasant curiosity about 
what is to be read. And this is most often the right 
assumption. It is not, of course, desirable to select those 
books which are within a child's laziest reach, like the fig 
that lay handily on the slothful Arab's breast. But it does 
demand what is right and proper: that the experience 
presented must be closely enough linked with a child's 
former ones to be within his grasp if he tries earnestly 
to reconstruct and to live in it. Granting such choices 
of literature, an introduction is oftenest an impertinence 
and a getting in the way of real reading. The best 
possible start is often simply sitting down pleasantly 
to read and enjoy oneself. 

READING ALOUD WITH COMMENT 

In the case of literature somewhat above the pupils' 
heads, reading in companionable fashion by the teacher, 



2 4 8 FADING AND LITERATURE 

witn pauses now and then for comment by him or by 
the pupils, is in most cases quite the most satisfactory 
beginning. The translations of Bible stories and of the 
Iliad and Odyssey, in grade nine — whatever indeed offers 
special diffculties — can not be approached so satisfactorily 
in any other way. Such reading should be without elo- 
cutionary effect or emotional overemphasis, but must 
show simple and sincere enjoyment and dramatic sense. 
It is obvious that it must be in a clear and agreeable voice. 
To such reading, at home or at school, most of us, I sup- 
pose, trace our first enjoyment and appreciation of litera- 
ture. We picture a home scene, and somebody reading 
beside the lamp. But the great majority of homes from 
which public school pupils now come are quite without 
such reading, and of tenest without any books at all ; it is 
our business to see that these young people have the best 
possible substitute in school. Quizzes on notes, dictionary 
reference, and merely scholarly introductions do not take 
the place of this. 

One of the first and best introductions to any literature 
— poetry, of course, especially, or poetic prose, or what- 
ever is specially difficult — will then be a pleasant and com- 
panionable reading aloud of first scenes or chapters, by 
the teacher in the classroom. It will furnish the necessary 
beginning of acquaintance with much excellent poetry 
and prose which is best tasted in this fashion. Pupils will 
thus become familiar with many lyrics by Miss Millay 
and pictures and tales in verse by Mr. Robert Frost, and 
delightful letters by Thackeray or Stevenson or Lamb. 
Such matters as they are not yet ready to hunt out and 
appropriate for themselves they are quite ready to under- 
stand and appreciate with the help of an interpreting voice 
and courteous encouragement. I have found the opening 
chapter of Silas Marner or of Ivanhoe, pretty diffi- 
cult reading for most ninth-graders, quite compre- 



BACKGROUNDS, APPROACHES 249 

hensible and interesting in a period or two of reading 
aloud, with plenty of pause for questions and for small 
illustrations, as about eccentric persons, from the pupils' 
own experience and remembrance. 

A most useful aid in such introductory reading 
consists of linking these with former adventures in books 
as well as in life. The description of Prior Aylmer in 
the second chapter of Ivanhoe is vivified and brought to 
familiar experience so soon as this prior is associated 
with the insolent clerics upon whom Robin Hood preyed ; 
and in this way also good preparation is made for the 
appearance of the outlaws later in the story. So the life 
and lot of common folk in various times and places — in 
Burns' Scotland, in Goldsmith's Deserted Village, in 
Tolstoi's Russia, or in our early colonies and pioneer dis- 
tricts — can be compared, as portrayed in various books, 
and so made more real by resemblances and differences 
discovered. Such linking up of experience is one of the 
best means of introducing and calling to life the persons 
and scenes of literature. 

READING POETRY ALOUD 

It must be remembered that poetry, the poetry of swing- 
ing rhythm which pupils can comprehend, is and has always 
been intended to be said, or better, chanted or sung, not 
pored over silently. Professor Abbott's poetry tests would 
probably have produced more encouraging results if those 
who were tested could have read the verses aloud. Par- 
ticularly such verse as the ballads needs most of all a 
rhythmic singing or saying to make it at all alive. A class 
considering ballads in silent study or, worse, taking them 
apart for structural analysis is a distressing sight. Nothing 
can be more foreign to rightful understanding. An old 
peasant woman who reluctantly recited a ballad for Scott 
complained, " Now you'll write them down and spoil 



2 5 o READING AND LITERATURE 

them; they were not meant for that, but to be sung." 
Really excellent teaching of literature is achieved through 
reading aloud in a proper spirit. Intelligent reading of 
verse like that, for example, of Mr. Noyes or Mr. Mase- 
field, can do more for one's apprehension of true poetry 
than years of ordinary school work. When this was tried 
some years ago at the Scarborough School, Dr. Horn, 
then principal, noted that the poets seldom commented on 
what they read. " Yes," one of them answered — in 
effect — "I put everything I had to say into that poem — 
and I rather doubt if many teachers can help by their notes 
and classroom exposition." While the French explica- 
tion at its best, as Dr. Brown describes it, 5 may be most 
excellent, at its average and worst it is, according to other 
observers, and at any rate by many teachers in this country, 
a most depressing and abominable performance. As this 
whole chapter attempts to show, some sorts of introduction 
and explication are not to be dispensed with. But where 
we can get on without, let us have courage to do so. 

Of course such reading by the teacher will, in good 
classes, pass almost insensibly into a carrying-on by the 
better pupils, and finally by each in the class. This will be 
often, like Understood Betsy's reading, a faring into new 
country among considerable obstacles, and the teacher 
must be fully prepared to help surmount these. It is clear 
that he will have read not only the text in hand, but all 
matter of genuine illumination upon it in notes and in 
other references. He will aid unobtrusively in pronun- 
ciation of words and by comment on essential details that 
are obscure or miscomprehended. Thus he will give in 
natural fashion, especially for a first attempt at new sorts 
of difficulty, the kind of guidance and help that is really 
necessary. Such aid in reading is particularly the busi- 

5 Rollo Walter Brown: How the French Boy Learns to Write. 
(Oxford Press, 1916), Chapter V, pp. 123 ff. 



BACKGROUNDS, APPROACHES 251 

ness of teachers in the grades and in junior high schools. 
Gradually children can then be helped to seek out really 
necessary details for themselves. When they have this 
power for a given sort of literature, the function of 
essential introduction to it has been adequately performed. 

PROVIDING ESSENTIAL BACKGROUNDS 

But some kinds of preparatory experience are not pos- 
sible to get at first hand, and these must be supplied in 
some other way. It is out of the question for anyone 
nowadays to read Shakespeare's plays as he and his con- 
temporaries meant them to be read — that is, to imagine 
them as they were performed in his theatre — without 
first knowing the essential results of recent scholarly 
study. Out of laborious research the playhouses and the 
everyday conditions of life which those plays picture have 
been most minutely reconstructed. That Elizabethan 
plays should be read in this fashion hardly anyone would 
question; and for such a desirable end a full body of ex- 
perience is indispensable. 

A pupil reading Julius Ccesar should reconstruct it as 
he goes along, into a play of London in 1600, with the 
costumes and manners of that period, and not with Roman 
setting or customs. He should see it on the platform 
stage projecting among the " groundlings," and played 
among young fashionables who sat on the stage itself. To 
do all this he must be introduced first into the spirit and 
customs of the time. He should see in as vivid imaging 
as possible the London street crowd, merchants and ap- 
prentices and fine people ; he should eat at an "ordinary," 
and cross the river in view of the heads exhibited over the 
Tower gate. He should particularly see the Globe Theatre 
itself, in proximity to the cockpits and bear gardens and 
shooting galleries, and mingle with its crowds of roy- 
sterers and gallants and masked ladies. He should picture 



252 READING AND LITERATURE 

clearly the stage, and the "houses" or recesses and bal- 
conies in the background. 

To appreciate the masques and courtly comedies he 
needs to know about the conditions of the "private 
theatres " inside the city, and of the court performances. 
To realize A Midsummer Night's Dream, he should view 
it, not as it has been revised and altered by editors of later 
view, but as it was actually given, a " folk-pageant," with 
its fairies bearing lights at dusk through the " houses " 
and an actual cry of hounds after a bear in the hunting 
scene. 6 If a pupil can thus realize these plays he will 
understand them as they were meant to be understood, 
for he will come nearer to seeing them as Elizabethan 
dramas than he can do at the average theatrical perform- 
ance to-day. The list of books for this chapter 7 contains 
a few references which can most help teachers and pupils 
to such realization. We owe our present understanding 
of the subject to many scholarly investigators, and in par- 
ticular to Professor Brander Matthews for emphasizing 
constantly and forcefully this right conception of the 
teaching of drama. What is desired is, of course, not 
minute and scholarly fidelity in every point of setting and 
costume, but as real a sense as we can get of Eliza- 
bethan heartiness of enjoyment, grossness of swagger 
and conquest, and delicate appreciation of romance and of 
literary precosity. Only an experience of these qualities 
expressed in the comedy and tragedy of the period can 
make the great plays live and move before us. 

A like reconstruction is needed for the comprehension 
of Bible stories and Greek myths and epics, of Chaucer's 
England and of Addison's. The use of Bible text and 
of Bible pictures for reconstituting the Hebrew narra- 

6 Charlotte Porter : A Midsummer Night's Dream as a Folk Pag- 
eant, Drama No. 26 and 27, 1917 (7: 217 and 461). 

7 Appendix I, pp. 362 fF. 



BACKGROUNDS, APPROACHES 253 

tives is illustrated adequately in Professor Pendleton's 
article. 8 The similar building-up of a scene of Greek 
life and manners in the heroic age is essential to any 
keenness of enjoyment of the Homeric poems in their 
English prose dress. It is merely confusing and dulling 
to try to read and remember lists of gods and demigods, 
Greek and Latin, such as Bulfinch and most other authors 
catalog. These characters are sufficiently introduced in 
the stories themselves; a table of their relationships may 
be useful, but it should be for reference, not for study and 
memorization. The stories are best introduced by a 
simple account of the Greek conception of sea and land 
and heaven, as in the early pages of Bulfmch's Age of 
Fable. With such an account children are equipped to 
reconstruct from the stories themselves the vivid life of 
adventurous kings and sea-roving heroes in the myths and 
epics, with their earnest and terrible beliefs in divine 
oracles and avenging furies. 

So, when we read Bunyan with our pupils, they must 
know the spirit of the Puritan preacher, and the erratic 
movement and drab color of his sect in England ; but this 
can be given best in a few revealing passages from Grace 
Abounding, without further commentary than the Pil- 
grim's Progress itself. To understand Henry Esmond 
or the Spectator Papers readers must appreciate as a 
reality the "formal courtesies and formal phrase" of 
that day, the keen bitterness of personal and political 
rancors, and the stringency of the code of honor. The 
problem here is to get young people of a time of subways 
and airplanes to picture, as a setting of very different 
times, a simple living on the surface of land and sea, amid 
the quiet of country places, or in the colorful town and 
court of Queen Anne. But here again Thackeray and 

8 C. S. Pendleton : The Bible in the Junior High School (English 
Journal J: 623). 



254 READING AND LITERATURE 

Addison so abound in concrete details as to require little 
assistance at our hands. Incidental commentary here and 
there is generally sufficient for making their writ- 
ings explicable. 

The necessity of a proper introduction to displace a 
completely wrong mood and attitude in approaching a 
poem is illustrated by Professor Baker. An elemen- 
tary-school teacher began without any preliminaries to 
read the ballad The Twa Corbies. The pupils laughed 
at the queerness of the pronunciation. The teacher was 
too wise to rebuke or comment in any way ; she simply laid 
the poem aside without attempting to finish it. Another 
day she began with a sentence or two about the scene of 
carnage after a battle, with crows, or corbies, perched 
or hovering over it. Then she read the ballad with 
marked effect. 

Wherever, then, there is possibility that a story will 
readily reveal itself, wherever there is no impassable 
barrier of misunderstanding or misconception to be re- 
moved first, surely it is much better to avoid all preambles 
and begin at once with reading the literature itself. Most 
harmful, unless avoided carefully, are all introductions 
that do not contribute wholly and briefly to this purpose. 
It is better to skip poor introductions altogether, and begin 
with individual adventure in reading or with intelligent 
reading aloud, made vivid with whatever questions and 
comments the class and the teacher consider essential to a 
general comprehension and realization of what is passing. 

THE AID OF EXCELLENT ART AND MUSIC 

All forms of art can help us to realization. We have 
suggested the help that may be found in illustrated editions 
and in pictures and phonograph records and the like. But 
we can hardly insist with too much emphasis that only 
real art can thus reinforce art. To introduce cheap- 



BACKGROUNDS, APPROACHES 255 

looking prints and commonplace photographs as illustra- 
tions of a finely imaginative poem is perhaps the worst 
foe to its appreciation. In even the most realistic novel 
the claim to unselective accuracy can be shown as absurd 
by attempts to illustrate the text with mere photographs of 
the scenes and persons. So much the more in romance, 
where only an imagination like the author's own can fit- 
tingly body forth the scenes. It is a distinct shock of dis- 
appointment to find a photograph of the robber valley 
illustrating Lorna Do one; any reader is able to picture 
it far more fittingly, as more bold and wildly precipitous. 
Just this enhancement of reality is of course the excel- 
lence of romance; to drag it down to the commonplace by 
flatly accurate pictures is as bad as putting measurements 
of altitude and other surveyors' details into its footnotes. 
The art that illustrates literature must be as fine art as 
the literature; it is as little concerned with factual ac- 
curacy. The music which our imaginations hear in beau- 
tiful verse is finer than poor attempts to present it. If 
our pupils can sing old English carols at Christmas time, 
or hear them beautifully sung, they can better realize the 
feast as described by Irving or Scott; but poor music is 
an offence merely. Since the English teacher cannot hope 
to be an expert critic in these different fields, he must 
always go to the teachers of other subjects and get their 
help in his inclusions. They should recognize his pur- 
pose as different from theirs, and perhaps, sanction what 
is not ideal by their standards in order to meet his needs. 
But whatever they brand as quite bad art or music 
should have no place in illustration of English literature. 

THE ATTITUDE OF APPROACH TO THE CLASSICS 

It must surely be understood that no slothful reading 
of easy and emotionally inciting favorite authors is con- 
templated in this study. What children will read just as 



256 READING AND LITERATURE 

well anyway certainly has little place in the discus- 
sions in our literature class, though we shall do well to 
encourage their intelligent reading of whatever is whole- 
some. The chief aim of studying literature is to make pos- 
sible excellent real experiences, in books and in life, which, 
without help, children would not get, or would get only 
dimly and in distortion. The success of this aim, we have 
noted, depends much if not altogether on the mood and 
purpose with which difficult literature is approached. 

Our best procedure is not to aim direct at "getting 
children to love the classic literature," as we have 
sometimes been exhorted to do. It is rather to provide a 
purpose sufficient to secure their understanding, their re- 
alization of such literature; for without such realization, 
nothing worthy of being called appreciation can possibly 
exist; with it, appreciation of whatever is related to the 
individual child's experience will be inevitable. 

Obviously, then, our first task is such a careful scru- 
tiny as we have already suggested of whatever we 
propose to offer our classes, a scrutiny that shall try 
definitely to discover whether the book is adapted, not 
only to the top ten per cent of the class, but to no 
less than ninety per cent of them. Unless we make 
this attempt again and again, honestly and earnestly, 
and unless we repeatedly check our judgments by the free, 
and so far as possible uninfluenced, reactions of all pupils, 
we cannot be sure that what we propose is actually within 
their reach if they try hard for it. Without this basic 
surety we are working very largely in vain. Our test 
should be, let me repeat, not wholly of their liking, but 
rather of their realization of the scenes presented and 
of the fundamental ideas. I believe that any statement of 
likes or dislikes should be welcomed, but never demanded. 
The wholly objective question, " What did you like in 
this or dislike? " is better than "Did you like it?" or 



BACKGROUNDS, APPROACHES 257 

"Why?" Given a realisation and some points of con- 
tact — som e resemblance to the pupil's own adventures, 
some parallel to his observation — no further discussion of 
appreciation is probably necessary. 

Once we feel reasonably sure of our choices, the ques- 
tion of approach is best solved probably something after 
this fashion : A great poem is to be read in a senior high- 
school class, studied to insure its realization, and analyzed 
so far as to discover its fundamental idea. The teacher 
may then simply say, " This poem is one which many men 
of the widest experience for a hundred — or two hun- 
dred or three thousand — years, have considered great and 
masterly. This does not mean that you will all like it, 
because, fortunately, people differ in their tastes and ap- 
preciations. I think that most of you will heartily enjoy 
it when you study and understand it. It is different from 
anything you have read before — a new sort of adventure. 
It is worth your while to find out why many educated and 
experienced people have read and celebrated it. If you can 
find that out, you will have at any rate a useful standard 
to apply to other poetry or prose, to discover whether 
writings you like especially, in magazines, for example, 
are also likely to survive and be considered permanently 
great. It is worth your while to know this poem, to spend 
the effort necessary to comprehend and realize it. If 
you find it as heartily enjoyable as I and others have done, 
you are so much the gainer. But it is profitable to study 
it anyhow." 9 

Such a matter-of-fact and frank statement of a reason- 
able attitude of mind is sufficient guarantee of good faith, 
and provides all necessary definition of purpose for right- 

B Elizabeth Hodgson: "Adolescent Prejudices against the Clas- 
sics" (English Journal 4- 427); Franklin T. Baker: "High-school 
Reading, Compulsory and Voluntary" (English Journal 4: 1) ; "An 
Educational Bogey" (Bulletin of the Illinois Association of Teach- 
ers of English, May 1, 1912). 

17 



258 READING AND LITERATURE 

minded young people in high school. Any further discus- 
sion of the point is hardly worth while. If, after the study, 
pupils question your judgment of the worth of the effort, it 
is fair and sensible to allow brief and apposite discussion 
of the point and to stand ready to revise your judgment 
if a fair minority show you that that judgment is not 
sufficiently wide in application. Professor Woodberry 
states this point well : 10 "It is wise for the reader ... to 
have a large share of self-respect, to prefer his own 
natural choices, to give latitude to his own wandering 
tastes, to indulge his own character. . . . Though . . . 
he may remain long or even always in a lower range of 
taste and a narrower sphere of knowledge, it is better 
so than that he should default to himself . . . .Self- 
reliance is the best way of man-making." 

The teacher must be particularly careful to see that he 
does not allow his own caprices of dislike to influence chil- 
dren's judgment against what is anywise worthy. A 
catholicity of taste that welcomes gladly anything sincere 
in conception and decently competent in workmanship is 
a far more desirable attitude of mind than a cheap, smart 
criticism that flaunts its dislikes in the supposition that 
they are superiorities. Yet the small and clever dispraising 
of literature which wider experience finds inadequate, but 
which is full of excellent perceptions and ideas for young 
people of more provincial outlook, is one of the most com- 
mon and unfortunate approaches which teachers of litera- 
ture provide for young people. 

A teacher owes it to his class to avoid passing on his 
prejudices to them. He had better refrain from taking up 
in class prose or poetry that he does not understand and 
enjoy himself. A friend tells me of a little child she 
knows, whose mother had read him most of Alice in 

"George E. Woodberry: The Appreciation of Literature (New 
York, 1907), p. 174 ff. 



BACKGROUNDS, APPROACHES 259 

Wonderland with keen and happy enjoyment. Later, when 
the child told parts of the story for someone's pleasure, 
there occurred in his appreciative narrative odd stretches 
of complete forgetting. Everybody was at a loss to ex- 
plain this until it was remembered that these passages 
he had altogether lost had been read to him originally, not 
by the mother, but by the boy's father, who despised the 
story as silly. I have known teachers who disliked the 
Iliad to wonder why most of their pupils markedly pre- 
ferred the Odyssey. And for one who considers the 
Ancient Mariner absurd, to be compelled to teach it is 
not merely an unpleasant duty ; it is an abominable injustice 
to the class. 

Mr. T. Sturge Moore, in a lecture on The Best Poetry, 
expresses adequately the harm of this sort of teaching. 11 
"Let me warn you against negative standards. Never 
record your impressions by enumerating faults, as the 
newspaper critic so often does. Never accept the absence 
of apparent flaws as proof of the presence of excellence. 
Keep to the positive merits and try to define them ; merely 
turn away from what calls for blame. Disparaging warps 
the mind far worse than over-lauding." In providing 
approaches for such literature as it is worth our pupils' 
while to read at all, let every teacher hold to this ex- 
cellent counsel. 

SUMMARY 

So much, then, for introducing our pupils to story or 
poem or essay. So far as possible, let the writer himself 
do his own introducing, without any intrusion of irrele- 
vant scholarly comment or general information, and with, 
above all, no mistaken attempts to pump enthusiasm or 
emotion into an experimental vacuum. The writer gen- 
erally knows best how to begin. Only in cases where the 

11 T. Sturge Moore: in Some Soldier Poets (Harcourt, Brace 
and Company, New York City, 1920), p. 147. 



2 6o READING AND LITERATURE 

readers or hearers that he addressed were widely different 
from our own young people, so that they cannot under- 
stand the story as Elizabethans or Greeks, for example, 
would understand it, is it desirable to furnish a background 
or approach. 

And where an introduction is attempted, let it be re- 
membered that the introduction must itself be real ex- 
perience, not dull explanation or sentimental-emotional 
talk. It will fail in proportion as the introducer is not 
himself an artist, but a dull pedagog; it will succeed in 
proportion as he sympathetically goes from the actual 
experiences of boys and girls to those perceptions and 
ideas that are essential for understanding a new story or 
essay or poem. 

Naturally such introductions will be brief. Nobody 
who talks well will talk long. 12 Obviously they will be 
better reinforced by good art — excellent pictures and 
music, sculpture and architecture in museums, and songs 
and dances, best if taken part in by the children them- 
selves. The introducer will studiously eliminate the 
merely informing, no matter how fascinating the sub- 
ject may be to him or how brilliantly he may be able 
to give dates and facts. He will give no place to items 
of geography or history or science, whatever good these 
may do to the pupils in another way, which do not con- 
tribute essentially to the picture or the idea. He must 
equally shun whatever is moralizing or deliberately en- 
thusiasm-stirring. For his aim has place only for what 
is essential to reconstructing the background of experi- 
ence which must be had before one can live in the story 
itself. The first result of following this counsel should 
be to cast out at once the greatest part of introductions 
in current texts and in many schoolrooms; this would 
surely be a distinct gain. If we teachers and editors 

13 E. C. Campagnac: The Teaching of Composition, p. 35. 



BACKGROUNDS, APPROACHES 261 

listened for a while, we might find out from children 
themselves, confronted with books they desire to read, 
what their difficulties are and what we had better do 
about it. 

Finally, a good introduction will create a proper atti- 
tude of mind for approaching a piece of literature. If the 
writing is difficult for the readers, the best beginning may 
be a sympathetic reading that helps interpret, and stays 
for question and comment which help make the action or 
the discussion live. If a book is remote in time and idea — 
while not too remote for full realization by those who 
attempt it with good spirit and energy — we may point 
briefly to its significance, to the worth of knowing what it 
has to present and why it is acclaimed, as a reasonable pur- 
pose for its mastery. Such straightforward presentation 
of the problem will usually direct effort in good spirit upon 
any worthy reading. No requirement of appreciation and 
no attempt to elicit it need be made ; realization of a deep 
and true human experience which a pupil can interpret is 
sufficient guarantee of his appreciation, and to such re- 
alization all our energies should be directed. Appre- 
ciation is a by-product of real comprehension of related 
experience, just as beauty is a by-product of worthy work 
to shape material well. We need not strive consciously for 
appreciation ; but in proportion as our shaping hand is in- 
formed by understanding of our materials, the lives of 
children, and the greatest experiences which men have suc- 
ceeded in chronicling, in that proportion our teaching will 
be beautiful and enduringly great. It may, too, con- 
tribute then to an appreciation of the meaning of life, 
which is of more import than any merely literary delight 
or fervor. 



CHAPTER IX 

THE USES OF COMPOSITION IN TEACHING 
LITERATURE 

This chapter is to discuss the use of composition 
in the literature class for its aid in developing literary 
understanding. We shall not be here concerned with the 
teaching of composition for its practical every-day uses, 
nor with its essential mechanics, but solely with its pos- 
sible effects in helping to realization of what is read. 

Two distinct sorts of writing and talking are pro- 
posed for this purpose: 

i. The composing of book notes and reviews and 
of good and sensible examinations. 

2. The attempt by a pupil to do for himself what 
in the hands of writers with more talent and 
experience results as literature : the venture 
in some sort of creative, imaginative compo- 
sition, whether prose or verse. 

We may discuss the use and abuse of each of these sorts of 
writing in literature classes, quite irrespective of their 
value or uselessness as practical composition lessons. 

A. GOOD AND SIMPLE BOOK NOTES AND EXAMINATIONS 
IN LITERATURE 

In the book clubs which we have been considering 
as a phase of the literature class teaching, we came 
upon the pupils' attempts to tell one another about the 
books they have liked or possibly disliked, to influence 
them to read or not to read. This is of course only one 
manifestation of a missionary instinct, and like the rest of 
its kind is liable to the mistakes of zeal. The child's report, 

262 



THE USES OF COMPOSITION 263 

where it is more than an animated phrase of commenda- 
tion or disparagement, is usually a tedious and detailed 
resume of the plot, with embroidery of comment that it 
was " awfully exciting " here or " funny " there. Oftenest 
the reader or hearer finds no real persuasion of its excite- 
ment or humor. The worst form of this usually futile and 
even pernicious summary is reached in certain " books of 
knowledge " that are very popular nowadays with parents; 
these give complete resumes of the novels of Scott and 
Dickens, with the result usually that the child thinks he has 
''got" them — just as he has got miscellaneous information 
from these same books. After such a false start it is only 
rarely that the child reads the literature itself. 

The summary or resume, like the synopsis of preceding 
chapters in a serial story, is generally a worthless and 
dull form of report. Its main justification is to prove that 
the child has read the book. But it is of course possible 
to find this out by less tedious means. The right sort of 
report will, besides, give sufficient information for testing 
the intelligence of the reading. Summaries are in place 
in certain situations in the teaching of reading or com- 
position, where there is an occasion for doing them well. 1 
But they seem to have a harmful rather than a helpful 
relation to increase in literary understanding and 
true appreciation. 

A few summaries by willing pupils, not allowed to 
use an undue amount of the class time, may be admitted 
in order to introduce the question : " Does this sort of 
report make you eager to read the book? What do you 
want to know about a book before starting it ? What do you 
think will make the class want to read your book? " A 
discussion may be begun of the kinds of books the pupils 
enjoy — in grades or junior high school, mainly stories 
of adventure and humorous stories. Once this is discov- 

l Chapter VI, pp. 178 ff . 



264 READING AND LITERATURE 

ered, we come to the question : " How would you tell 
somebody else what would let him know whether he wanted 
to read a certain humorous or adventurous story? " For 
people differ widely in their ideas of what is funny or what 
is good adventure. They want to know what kind of ad- 
venture it is, or what makes you think the tale funny. 

Pupils very soon get into a way of suggesting to 
those who report that they give a sample of their story 
to illustrate. Perhaps they read a bit of the story ; more 
often they tell an incident or two that backs up their 
point. Incidentally, they learn the value of good illustra- 
tive matter — examples or samples — in all composition that 
aims to make a point. But the major interest here is in 
seeing whether, in a very brief talk or book note, each 
cannot get his book so well before the rest of the class 
that several will want to read it. 

A number of classes in one school from the third 
grade up have helped in making a file of cards about 
various books in the library which they have read and 
can recommend. These cards are kept for the succeed- 
ing class, who may want to read similar books, and 
the aim is to prepare such a statement in a few words as 
will be of major help to someone else in deciding whether 
to read the book. From time to time, in intermediate 
grades and high school, slightly longer reviews may be 
assigned as regular oral or written themes, usually ad- 
dressed to the class and commenting on books that most 
have not yet read. The interest that the cards excite 
and the real eagerness in question and criticism when 
reviews are given orally or read before the class is one 
indication of the reality and value of the process. 

In all this we must avoid the evils and stupidities of 
what Professor Aydelotte calls " infant criticism." It is 

2 See Miss Eaton's account of these notes, English Journal, De- 
cember, 1920. 



THE USES OF COMPOSITION 265 

harmfully priggish for youngsters to give second-hand 
comments on Longfellow's verse structure or on his imita- 
tion of continental authors. Nothing is more futile and 
wrong than to allow pupils to present any sort of opinion 
on subjects of which they have no real knowledge. But on 
certain matters each child who reads earnestly and with 
honest attempt at understanding is a first-rate authority. 
He knows whether the reading of a story actually " made 
him feel like being there and seeing it happen " or " made 
him think he was right in it." And here he has a basis 
for judging quite honestly whether he likes the story — 
whether he enjoys that sort of realization or not. Like 
one junior high-school boy reading The Black Arrow, he 
may say, "If you're reading it before dinner you don't 
want to stop for any dinner," to which another responds 
heartily, " You said it." Provided always he tells what he 
likes or dislikes about it, he is in little danger of vague 
generalization or second-hand opinion. And this is a 
question which he can readily answer, while " Why he 
likes it," as Professor F. T. Baker says, is for a long time 
— probably till late in the senior high school — beyond him. 
In a seventh-grade class a girl who still read mainly 
fairy stories reported that she liked the Boy Vigilantes in 
Belgium because such impossible things happened, one 
after the other. This did not influence anybody to read 
the book, because nobody else in that class had the same 
tastes. In the same hour two others objected to Jules 
Verne's Mysterious Island because mere improbable 
chance often helped the characters out at dire need — their 
discovery of one match, or of a box of quinine carried in 
by the dog. But still another boy pointed out that even 
if there was one match found, the fire they lighted with 
it went out, " and then they had an awful time trying to 
light a fire with a burning glass." I found Sherlock 
Holmes criticized harshly in the same class because the 



266 READING AND LITERATURE 

hero "always knows everything;" The Sign of the Four 
was praised because there that hero " gets fooled." Of 
another story, in the modern mode of sudden plunges into 
violent activity, a boy said, " It begins in such a hurry 
that you don't know what's happened and have to read 
two or three chapters to find out." Such criticism is 
perfectly normal and intelligent, based as it is on the pupil's 
own experience and observation, and it makes for real and 
solid standards for choosing books to read. It is quite 
different from the " infant criticism," the mere parrot- 
ing of opinions heard or read but unrealized, which is en- 
couraged in many literature classes. 

EXAMPLES OF BOOK NOTES 

This, then, is the sort of report or criticism upon a 
book of which we can make most profitable use : We can 
ask what sort of book it is and what the pupil likes or dis- 
likes in it, with samples or illustrations of his point. We 
can get this sort of report either in class discussion, in 
card form for filing, or as a theme addressed to the class 
or sometimes to the teacher. In telling " what sort of book 
it is " pupils may find it convenient to discover that " what 
happened? where? and when? " are chiefly important. It 
is so useful to have the answer to this question formulated 
by the pupils before they come into a class for discussion 
of books read that we may well suggest that they write 
out at least this statement for use in their oral reports. 2 If 
they add to this a specific statement of what they like or 
dislike in their book, or what they think the author most 
enjoyed writing, with illustrations or possibly readings 
from the book itself, they have done all that need be ex- 
pected of pupils in the grades or the junior high school 
in making reports on their general reading. But all this 

2 This, as well as the questions for the book-notes, was suggested 
by Professor W. S. Hinchman. 



THE USES OF COMPOSITION 267 

should be quite informal and natural. I add several book- 
notes by pupils in various grades, not as models, but simply 
as samples of such work as can be expected from any 
child of usual intelligence who has read a book with keen 
interest and who has a sensible reason for reporting on it 
to someone else. 

The third-grade reports were specially frank in dis- 
cussing the grading of the books read, because the pupils 
understood that the list for the next third grade would 
be built in part on the recommendations : 3 

The Story of a Bad Boy (note by a girl). 

I did not read it through. I think it is too old for 
third-grade children. 

The Counterpane Fairy (note by the same child). 

I read it through. I liked it. Teddy was a little 
sick boy. His mother was up with him most of the 
night and had gone to take a nap. Teddy heard 
someone say, " Oh, dear, what a hill to climb ! " It 
was the Counterpane Fairy. She came every day to 
see him. 

Two girls' opinion on Merry Tales by E. L. and A. M. 
Skinner. 

I did not care much for it. I did not read it through. 
It was too babyish. 

This book is full of stories. I like the book because 
it has many good stories about fairies and brownies 
and plain people. 

Another girl reports on Gulliver's Travels: 

It is the best book I ever read. It tells about how 

3 All these reports, and the themes following, are word for word 
as the pupils wrote them, but the spelling- and punctuation have in 
most cases been standardized. Most of these are probably at least 
one year in advance of pupils in corresponding public school grades. 



268 READING AND LITERATURE 

Gulliver gets shipwrecked on an island which is in- 
habited by little people. In his next travel a storm 
takes them out of their course and they land on an 
island. He wanders off, and when he comes back he 
sees that they have gone away and he is left in the 
hands of giants. You will like it, I know. 

Letters from a Cat by Helen Hunt. 

I like it very much. So would you. It is about a 
cat that writes letters to its master that is away. 

The Fables of 2Esop — edited by Joseph Jacobs. 

I like this book because it is about animals and 
men. Each story has a meaning to it, but I like it 
because the stories are so nice. 

The Odyssey for Boys and Girls by Church. 

I liked it. I read it through. I liked it because it 
had bravery and romance in it. And the way it 
was told. 



FROM THE FOURTH GRADE 

Jack of all Trades by Beard. 

I like it very much. I liked it because it was about 
making things. I am making a house at school, so 
this book was very useful. 

Puck of Pook's Hill by Kipling. 

I don't like this one very much because it is very 
dreary. It is not the kind I like. 



Emmeline by Elsie Singmaster. 



THE USES OF COMPOSITION 269 

I can say one thing about this book, that it is not 
like other stories about what every child does every 
day. It is about a girl who lived in the Civil War and 
her mother sends her to her grandmother and grand- 
father and they are not there, and the rebels come 
and she helps bandage the wounded rebels. 

Why the Chimes Rang by Alden. 

I like this book because it tells of the rewards one 
gets from being pious and kind. [ ! ] 

Understood Betsy by Dorothy Canfield. 

I think the book is very nice and interesting. It 
is about a little girl who was born, and she was not 
very strong to begin with. But in the end she was 
strong, rosy, and sun-burned. 

JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL REPORTS 

Of Mitchell's Adventures of Frangois an eighth-grade 
boy wrote: 

An adventure story of an orphan during the French 
Revolution. He gets into some very tight scrapes. 

A seventh-grade boy thus describes Silas Marner — he is 
at least sincere: 

I have read Silas Marner. It is an interesting book, 
but quite dry in places. It takes a good while to get 
started, and when it does get started it doesn't go 
very fast. 

The same boy wrote: 

The Wind in the Willows is a book about some 
animals that live like people. It is very interesting, 
even though the name sounds babyish. 



270 READING AND LITERATURE 

And also 

A Christmas Carol is a very nice descriptive story. 
It is about an old miser who gets affected by a spirit, 
and then is very charitable. 

Typee by Herman Melville. 

Typee is the story of two runaways from a ship, and 
their adventure. The Typees are reported to be a 
fierce, warlike tribe, but it turns out to be a peace- 
ful, lazy community. Nevertheless, the two comrades 
are in constant peril of being dined upon. Parts of it 
are very funny. 

Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain (Grade 7). 

Tom Sawyer is a very funny story, and there are 
a lot of good tricks in it which boys should know. 
Huck Finn is the same sort of a story as Tom Sawyer. 

Ramona by Helen Hunt Jackson (Grade 8). 

Ramona is a book written about the cruel treat- 
ment of the Indians in the southern part of Cali- 
fornia. The heroine is Ramona, who is half Indian 
and half Mexican. She lives with an aunt who has 
no affection for her and is devoutly religious. I like 
it for one reason because of the very interesting 
characters. I think it was written to save the 
Indians, something as " Uncle Tom's Cabin " was 
written to free the negroes. 

The Cruise of the Cachalot by Frank T. Bullen (Grade 7) . 

This is the story of a whaling barque that cruised 
around the world. It is a true story, but in some 
places it seems very unlikely. Two men are killed 
by whales and three boats smashed. The captain 
is murdered by one of the crew, who killed himself 
also. They [ ?] visited several islands in the Pacific. 
I like this book very much because it is true and not 



THE USES OF COMPOSITION 271 

just a fake. / 

Captains Courageous by Kipling (Grade 7). 

I like most books about boats, but I didn't like this 

one very much. I didn't like it because it was rather 

slow reading and it took rather a long time to 

say anything. 

The book like Puck, earlier, clearly belongs in a higher 

grade. 
The Biography of a Grizzly by Ernest Seton-Thompson. 
Ernest Seton-Thompson has given in this book the 
life history of a grizzly bear. His cubhood, manhood, 
and old age are described in a very interesting man- 
ner. I like the parts best where the bear kills his 
enemies, including men who shoot at him for sport. 
He is also intelligent, as he learns how to get out of 
bear traps. 

Tom Sawyer. 

Tom Sawyer is a very interesting book about a 
boy. It is characteristically like a boy, and he shows 
great ingenuity in scrapes. It is a very good ad- 
venture story and quite exciting. Tom didn't have 
any mother or father and he just lived with his Aunt 
Polly. He also had a goody-goody brother named 
Sid, who was younger than himself. One Saturday 
he had to whitewash a fence. All the boys made fun 
of him, but he pretended that it wasn't work at all, 
and that no one else could do it as well. All the boys 
finally wanted to paint the fence so much that each 
one gave Tom something to let him do it instead. 

SENIOR HIGH SCHOOL REPORTS 

Other questions may well be met in reports by pupils 
in the senior high school. The question " What sort of a 
book is it? " is closely related to one already discussed: 4 

4 Chapter VII, pp. 221 ff. 



272 READING AND LITERATURE 

" What is the author trying to do? What is his pur- 
pose? " This must be understood to mean no deliberate 
seeking for a moral, but an exploration simply of the 
intent of the book, whether to amuse with story or picture, 
to reveal and develop character, to show a social situation, 
or to present the sequence of effect upon cause. Thus 
understood, the question can be intelligently studied and 
answered as a part of the informal reports in senior high 
school, as in the note on Ramona already quoted, or even 
in the lower grades ; but it is probably a requirement of the 
senior high-school report only. A judgment of how well 
the author does what he apparently intended is perhaps 
given sufficiently for our purposes in the statement and 
illustration of what the pupils like or dislike in the story. 
I think that we have here sufficient material for excellent 
reports either on books for reading or on so-called " books 
for study." The desirable study for any real literature, 
we have insisted, is getting at its central idea and simple 
fundamental structure, not exploring its tributaries of in- 
formation and digging among its ornaments of figure or 
allusion. The reports here suggested can be made a good 
test of this sort of study. 

Not only in senior high school, but throughout the 
grades, standards should be set and raised higher by giving 
pupils examples of excellent criticism which they can ap- 
preciate. The book reviews in the Nation and similar 
journals, and occasional articles in the Atlantic, contain 
often clever characterizations of cheap current fiction, or 
specific accounts of worthy books which stress qualities 
that high school pupils understand and appreciate. The 
teacher's recommendations should be illustrative of real 
excellence in criticism. 

The reports following were written by pupils in the 
senior high school: 



THE USES OF COMPOSITION 273 

Androcles and the Lion by Bernard Shaw. 

Androcles and the Lion is a story of the persecution 
of the Christians in Rome during the early Roman 
Empire. However, it is not a sad story, telling how 
cruelly the Christians were persecuted, but shows 
the funny side of it, and shows that the Christians 
were often rather silly. Also it gives the different 
types of early Christians. It does not so much 
describe the characters of individuals as the charac- 
ters and views of the Christian and Pagan parties. 
The following is an incident in the beginning of the 
second act: 

Centurion: Halt! Orders from the captain. Now, 
then, none of your larks. The captain's coming. 
Mind you behave yourselves. No singing, look re- 
spectful. Look serious if you are capable of it. See 

that big building there? It is the Coliseum 

(The captain arrives.) Attention! Salute! 

The Christians (cheerfully). God bless you, 
Captain. 

The Captain You will impress upon 

your soldiers that there must be an end to the pro- 
fanity and blasphemy of Christian hymns on the 
march. I have to reprimand you, Centurion, for not 
only allowing this, but actually doing it yourself. 

Centurion (apologetically). The men march bet- 
ter, Captain. 

Captain. No doubt; for that reason an exception 
is made in the case of the march called " Onward, 
Christian Soldiers." This may be sung except when 
marching through the forum or in hearing of the 
Emperor's Palace; but the words must be altered 
to " Throw them to the lions." (The Christians 
laugh loudly.) 

(Tenth-grade pupil.) 
18 



274 READING AND LITERATURE 

The Vizier of the Two-horned Alexander, Stockton. 

Can you imagine a spring of water, innocent to 
look at, but with the power of making you immortal? 
Think of living on forever, not daring to tell of your 
immortality, fearing you would be put in a lunatic 
asylum. Think of having to move every fifty years 
or so, or people would become suspicious of your un- 
changing appearance. If you like the deliciously ab- 
surd, read this book. (Tenth-grade pupil.) 

Mr. B riding Sees it Through by H. G. Wells. 

This book tells the most accurate story of the life 
of an English family during the war. It is not a story 
in the true sense of the word. It is really a live pic- 
ture. It tells about the home life of Mr. Britling, 
how he occupied his time before and after the war, 
how he thought before and after the war, and how his 
thoughts and home life were influenced by the war. 

Mr. Britling gives an accurate picture of an un- 
aggressive Englishman. What I liked about the 
book was its convincing truth. It made me see the 
war from a different angle, the Englishman's. The 
book is a strange mixture of humor and tragedy, and 
the characters in it were so true to life that the story 
sounded real. 

It is my belief that the author tried to do the fol- 
lowing things in his book : 

1. Show the Englishman's side of the war. 

2. Show the Englishman's character and charac- 
teristics. 

3. Show the life of a modern English family. 

4. Show the thoughts of an Englishman on all 
questions. (Eleventh-grade pupil.) 

EXAMINATIONS IN LITERATURE 5 

Literature examinations can be, and have been, of 

most diverse types. Where the intent is to prove or dis- 

5 See W. W. Hatfield : "Functional" Tests, English Journal (5 : 
696), December, 1916. 



THE USES OF COMPOSITION 275 

prove actual reading of a book, a demand for a resume or 
detailed questions like ' 'Describe the Vicar's second best 
bedroom " 6 are in order. Where memorization is an 
assignment, it can be readily tested and quite accu- 
rately measured. 

But we have suggested that our attempt should rather 
be to secure intelligent, comprehending reading — such 
reading as calls forth realization of incidents and aspects 
and therefore makes possible understanding of funda- 
mental ideas and actual appreciation. And this is not, 
perhaps, so accurately and readily examined. 

It has been sufficiently insisted upon that compre- 
hension must be tested in some such fashion as that of the 
Thorndike scales; and this is of course a requirement in 
reading literature as well as other matter. Such questions 
on comprehension, it will be remembered, call, not for 
memory of details, but for understanding of what is 
actually before the eyes. And in literature classes these 
will rarely have to do with details, but will deal with 
central ideas and significant relations, The examination 
in literature may very well be given with books open; 
it may yet be searching and keen. A pupil who has read 
with intelligence a novel like Richard Feverel or a poem 
like Moody's Gloucester Moor can attempt to pick out 
or sum up its essential idea; to do this requires and 
demonstrates a mature and keen judgment, and such a 
test therefore measures the product of literature teaching 
by a most severe standard. It gives no opportunity for 
bluff or evasion ; it is too large a task to be done without 
real preparation. It examines not into relatively unim- 
portant data of information, but into essential under- 
standing and mastery. 

Of course details can be inquired into by this method 
so far as a teacher considers worth while. We may ask 

6 From a College Entrance Board Examination some years ago. 



276 READING AND LITERATURE 

for explanation of a passage for the benefit of one of the 
class who has failed to understand it, or for evidence sup- 
porting a pupil's view of the character of Godfrey Cass or 
Brutus. These are often most excellent questions — the 
better because they turn, not on memory of isolated facts, 
but on such familiarity with the literature read as makes 
possible and pleasant a return to it again for real purposes. 
The literature examination may be anything you please, 
but it doubtless is well to test the defmiteness of pic- 
ture, the clearness of comprehension, and particularly a 
pupil's sense of full meaning in a literary work, rather 
than his memory of intricacies of the plot and other less 
important details. 

Following are some answers by eighth-graders to 
questions of the sort proposed. The first was written after 
the pupils had read two or three comedies of Shakespeare 
individually and Twelfth Night in class; this first paper 
is of superior merit for this grade, the second seems to me 
rather below average, and the third above: 

The play that I like best is A Midsummer-Night's 
Dream. I like the characters in it best. Some of the 
other plays, I think, are perhaps better in some ways, 
but Puck and Titania and Bottom are inimitable. In 
nearly all of Shakespeare's plays he gets it all in a fear- 
ful mixup, as in Twelfth Night, and to a lesser extent 
As You Like It, but none of these are half so mixed 
up as this one. 

Tell us what you think of Brutus ? 

I think that Brutus was a flattering sort of man. 
[He apparently means easily flattered.] The reason 
why he killed Caesar was that he thought he was 
wanted more than Caesar. If Cassius had not thrown 
letters into Brutus' window, Brutus would not have 
been in the conspiracy. Brutus was not such a bad 



THE USES OF COMPOSITION 277 

man. He was very weak-minded. He took every- 
thing for granted. 

I think that Brutus was not very bad, and that 
he was rather weak-minded and submitted to flattery. 
He took everything for granted. He was the best of 
the conspirators, as he was forced in by Cassius, 
etc. He went in the conspiracy in a half-hearted 
way. He was slightly self-conscious all the way 
through. He probably would not have gone into the 
conspiracy had Cassius not put the letters in his 
house. He also wished credit for things, as can be 
seen by his attempt to make Messala believe he had 
not heard of Portia's death. 

For the rest, such informal reports as I have been 
advocating seem to me to furnish the best sort of exam- 
ination into "apprehension" of what is read. To allow 
pupils, perhaps in a class hour, to select the most satisfac- 
tory passages in an essay or a romance, to illustrate their 
contention that the story is dull or jolly or impossible, or to 
pick out their best-liked character and tell what leads 
them to choose him furnishes an opportunity for individu- 
ality and for real evidence of appreciation. These reports 
should be made with the least possible formality. Young 
people of all grades write freely and individually in 
answer to such questions, and give their best evidences 
of value derived from what they have read. 

b. children's own attempts at literature 

Of children's own attempts at imaginative composi- 
tion there is less to be said. The only requisite is that 
the pupils be allowed freedom simply to express what they 
have experienced and thought, with no attention to 
"forms of discourse" and with no conscious heed of 
" literary technique." It seems to me most unfortunate 
to have children assigned or required to imitate anything 



2 78 READING AND LITERATURE 

whatever. 7 But if they have an idea of their own to tell, 
about an amusing experience or a bit of imagined adven- 
ture — suggested by a story or by actual happenings — 
there is often no necessity for even suggestion of ways 
and means ; the pupils will go out everywhere to look for 
them, will discuss various procedures with one another, 
will imitate when imitating fits their purpose, and will, 
best of all, criticize courteously and with growing dis- 
crimination the attempts their classmates make at stories 
or verse or essays. 

Often the things children write in this way are not 
intended for publication, but merely for private circula- 
tion among special friends i — even the lyric impulse usu- 
ally demands at least that degree of publicity. A teacher 
is fortunate in his relations with a pupil if he is himself 
chosen for inclusion in that select audience. He needs 
special tact here to see that he is neither indiscriminate 
in appreciation nor too severe in judgment. When he has 
shown that he can read a child's theme, not as an expert 
in picking flaws in it, but as an intelligently sympathetic 
person reading for enjoyment and greater experience, he 
will be the more readily accepted as in reality an appre- 
ciative reader and a helpful critic. 8 

SETTING A HIGHER STANDARD 

Once a child has written what seems to him satisfying 
— what has reached the limit of his ability just then and 
has perhaps won the highest commendation of his audience 
—it is time to give him a higher and farther view of per- 
formance he cannot yet equal but that he can understand, 
and thus set his goal some distance ahead. Something of 

7 See the bibliography for this chapter (pp. 365, ff.) for interest- 
ing discussions of this question. 

8 It should be repeated that composition for the purposes of liter- 
ature is alone considered here. Of course the few genuine funda- 
mentals of literacy will be enforced in these writings also. 



THE USES OF COMPOSITION 279 

the sort that he has tried is naturally best of all. When he 
has attempted a story of animal adventure, we can give 
him a chapter or two from one of Jack London's dog 
stories. If he has tried poetry we can show him excel- 
lent work in the same structure — ballad or triolet or blank 
verse. He may or may not succeed in doing work of some 
literary merit. But, what is most to our purpose here, a 
pupil who comes upon something excellent from this angle 
of approach is capable of a degree of appreciation that 
would otherwise be impossible for him. 

And this is the chief good of using, in literature 
classes, children's attempt to give imaginative form to 
their own favorite experiences and pet ideas. They come 
at the reading of literature thereafter from the con- 
structive and not the analytical side; they are trying to 
build and not pick apart. It is really in this way that 
one can best understand any piece of literature: 
Someone else, who sees keenly and appreciatively, has 
tried to record his sense experiences and the ideas they have 
generated. He chose the form that best suited him — story 
or ballad or ode or essay. I, following in his track down 
the centuries, have also seen and touched a bit of life and 
thought about it. I have tried to give it the same sort of 
expression. Where I have measurably succeeded I am the 
more able to appreciate the great writer's fine mastery; 
where I can perceive my failure, his success is the more 
excellent by contrast. 

Help is genuinely seeing what is great in perception 
or in depth of thought or in scope of experience will go 
far to prevent any unpleasant over-assurance on the part 
of a youngster who has "made" the school paper or 
received the highest vote of his class on a story or play. 
Such perception of superiority is most possible to the 
youngster who has felt the difficulty of a smaller but 
comparable achievement. 



2 8o READING AND LITERATURE 

And his achievement is comparable. It has been found, 
through the experiments conducted in the making of 
composition scales, that in a consensus of cultivated judg- 
ments — usually by well over a hundred judges — para- 
graphs from Stevenson and de Quincey and Lamb and 
Ruskin ranked above the best writings of college fresh- 
men in much the same proportion as these rank above 
the work of pupils in lower grades. Naturally single para- 
graphs do not show the whole scope and power of any 
piece of writing. The grandness of conception of the 
Odyssey is not to be perceived by quotation of any part 
of it, nor is the compact structure and inevitable move- 
ment of The Scarlet Letter. But it is perhaps sufficiently 
clear that in the small units a child attempts, he is inferior 
to, but comparable with, greater artists who have trod the 
same stretch of road. The conflict that has been waged 
over the authorship of The Young Visiters shows that a 
child who can sustain her narrative for a hundred pages 
or more and show vivid observation and make quaint com- 
ment is capable, according to some very competent judges, 
of work which other judges quite as competent cannot 
possibly admit as a child's. 

Of the following stories, the two first are reproduced 
from shorthand notes of second-graders' stories after 
I had told them only once the story of " The Little Rabbit 
that Wanted Red Wings." 9 The first narrative at- 
tempts more and is more original ; the second shows more 
organization and completeness. The stories of the Jonquil 
were first told and then written by children of Bohemian 
parents in the eighth grade of a Cleveland public school. 

The Little Rabbit that Wished to be a Bear 

The little rabbit was with his mother and he saw 
a bear coming along. 

9 From Carolyn S. Bailey's For the Story Teller. 



THE USES OF COMPOSITION 281 

11 Oh ! mother," he says, " I wish I was as big as the 
bear and had such thick, nice warm fur." 

The bear did not hear this and his mother said : 

" Oh, why are you so silly? " 

And another time he saw a squirrel that came 
along and he said: 

" Oh, mother I wish I was as big as that bear," 
and the squirrel heard, but not the bear, and the 
squirrel said: 

" Why don't you go to the wish pond ? " 

And he said, " Oh, I forgot," and he said — 

And he went down to the wish pond and jumped 
around three times and he wished to be as big as a 
bear, so he looked at himself — he was just like a bear, 
only a little bit too big this time, and he went up and 
knocked at his mother's door and she opened it, and 
when she saw it she slammed it fast, and his nose 
got in the way — the door caught it, so he tried to 
get out but could not. The squirrel came along and 
he said: 

" Why are you trying to pull like that for ? " 

He said, " The door has caught me — mother would 
not let me in and the door caught me — I cannot get 
out," and he said : 

" I will pull your legs." 

And he took his legs ; he pulled them, pulled them, 
but his nose did not get out. And then his mother 
opened it again, and then he ran away to the wish pond 
as fast as he could. And he saw a little bird this time 
and the bird had blue wings, and he jumped around 
to get the bear off as if he was a bird, and as he was 
jumping around he thought that he would like to be 
it again, and he was it again and he did not know it, 
and he jumped around again and tried to get it off 
again, and he got it off that time, and he jumped 
around to be the form of a bird, and he got it and he 
tried to fly up in the tree. He got up there and then 
he tried to fly a little further to see how wings would 



282 READING AND LITERATURE 

go, and he flied and went into another tree and then in 
another tree, and then there was a big river he had 
to pass and he flied and flied. There was a boat 
coming very fast — a motor boat — he — he tried to get 
to it, going down, down, nearly to the river, and 
finally he fell into the boat. 

The Little Rabbit that Wished for Porcupine Quills 

You all remember the story of the rabbit with the 
red wings. Well, this is to be a story. 

The rabbit when he saw Mr. Hedgehog come 
along said: 

" Oh, mother, I wish I could have those nice 
needles." 

And Mr. Porcupine heard him. 

" Why don't you go to the wish pond? " 

And he said, " Oh ! I never thought of that ; thank 
you for reminding me." 

And he went down as quick as he could and jumped 
around three times, and he said: 

" Oh ! I wish I could have those nice needles like 
Mr. Porcupine." 

And when he looked at himself he was all full of 
needles, and when he went home his mother and sis- 
ter wanted to kiss him, and his brothers and father — 
and he stuck the needles right into them, and he says : 

" Oh ! mother, I wish I did not have these 
needles now." 

And Mr. Hedgehog heard him ask for it and 
he said: 

" Why don't you go to the wish pond ? " 

And he went to the wish pond — and he said — he 
jumped around three times and said to himself: 

" Oh ! I wish I had these needles off." 

And he looked at himself. 

" Oh ! my needles are off. Goodie ! " 



THE USES OF COMPOSITION 283 

The Jonquil 

Hundreds and hundreds of years ago, even before 
Christ was born, there were trumpeters that used to 
go about the streets and proclaim things that hap- 
pened in the country. These men were dressed with 
starched collars around their necks. They were cut 
like the petals of a flower. They carried golden 
trumpets, and sharp swords that sparkled in the sun. 
There were very many of these trumpeters, and they 
all were good friends. They took an oath saying that 
if any one of them was in trouble they would all 
help him. 

One of the king's trumpeters had stolen one 
of his golden cups, and he was to be eaten by the 
lions. When his friends heard of this they all armed 
themselves with spears. They then put on shining 
gold collars, and took their golden horns. Now the 
king had a witch to guard him, and when they came to 
the palace the witch had fixed some water, and told 
them to come with her. She had cast a spell on them 
so they could not use their swords. They went into 
her room with bowed heads, and when she threw the 
water on them, their swords turned green, and to-day 
you can see them with bowed heads, and their green 
spears, and golden collars, and trumpets. We call 
them Jonquils. 

Jonquil 

Many years ago there lived a little girl named 
Joana Quil. She lived on a farm. Her parents 
were very poor and she had to work hard in order 
to get enough to eat. She always wore an old tat- 
tered sunbonnet and an old tattered dress. When 
she was about ten years old her parents died and she 
was left alone on the farm. 

One day when she was working alone in the field, 
a fairy saw her. The fairy felt sorry for her old 



284 READING AND LITERATURE 

clothes, so she took her wand and changed the old 
torn bonnet for a dainty yellow one. Then she 
changed the old dress for a fresh green one, and set 
a number of elves with long green swords to guard 
her. She told them that they should stay there, for 
if they would leave Joana she would be turned into 
a flower. 

Now, the elves did not like to do anything the fairy 
told them to, so as soon as she went away they left 
their swords and ran away. Immediately Joana 
turned into a flower, and to this day we find her in 
the field with the swords about her. We call 
her Jonquil. 

The Tree of Jupiter 

It was a warm, drowsy, sleepy day, with only the 
monotonous humming of the bees to break the still- 
ness. A group of children gaily dressed in white 
tunics and bright sashes gathered about the white- 
haired seer of the village and begged for a story. 
Finally he began: 

" Once, when Creostus, king of Alphine, which 
was a beautiful plain to the south by the sea, was 
hunting in the forests near his palace, he came upon 
a wonderful tree, all in blossom, with flowers of a 
deep azure blue. Creostus ordered the tree to be 
transplanted to the palace garden, never noticing 
beneath it a mossy stone slab, serving as an altar. 

" Now, Jupiter, when he heard Creostus' orders, 
was furious, for the tree was sacred to him, and at 
the first sound of a spade striking the roots, started 
to hurl a thunderbolt at Creostus. But Diana, whose 
favorite Creostus was, seized his arm, and instead the 
bolt flew straight at the volcano shadowing the plain. 
The bolt flew through the mountain to the regions 
of Pluto. There it so angered the giants imprisoned 
in the volcano that they threw up fire, smoke, ashes, 
and steam, which laid waste Alphine. Jupiter, 



THE USES OF COMPOSITION 285 

realizing his folly, carried the tree back to the highest 
point of Olympus, where the blue of its flowers, 
reflecting on the heavens, gives us the color of sky 
we have to-day, children." 

Grade IX, Horace Mann School, 1917. 

Why the Wind Blows 10 

Once, long ago there was a king. He had a little 
son and he asked the Wind to watch him. The Wind 
loved the little boy and in summer time the gentle 
breezes would rock his cradle. 

One day, as the Wind was talking with the Ocean, 
the little boy saw a bird. It had curious feathers. 
He followed it because he wanted to know where 
it nested. 

When the Wind was through talking with the 
Ocean he could not find the little boy anywhere. He 
looked for him days and nights, and then decided to 
go back to tell the king. 

When he told the king about the little boy having 
run away, the king was very angry. He sent the 
Wind all over the world to look for him. 

So nowadays, when you hear the wind howling 
outside your window, you know that he is looking 
for the lost child he loved so much. 

The Myth You Never Heard 

Pandora had her full share of curiosity just like 
any other boy or girl, and we all know what awful 
thing came of it. Well, the box containing Troubles 
wasn't the only thing she opened. She simply 
couldn't see any mysterious bag or chest without 
finding out what was in it. 

10 Written by a third-grade girl in Miss Nell Curtis's class in the 
Lincoln School, New York City. No myths had been read by the 
children, but they had talked about what sort of stories myths are and 
then had wanted to make some of their own. Miss Curtis has a most 
interesting collection of the productions of each pupil in the class. 



286 READING AND LITERATURE 

One day when Pandora was wandering over the 
mountain near her home looking for something to do, 
she came to a great, dark cave. An old man clothed 
in regal robes, with a long grey beard on his chin 
and a crown on his bald pate, sat at the entrance 
dozing in the warm sunshine. Pandora looked at 
him wondering why he was there; then she took a 
peep into the cavern and beheld five or six great 
leathern bags that contained something! The little 
girl's eyes widened with interest. She stepped up 
to the first one and touched it. It was very soft. 

Unable to restrain her curiosity she untied the 
thong. Instantly a terrific blast swept the terrified 
Pandora into the air and carried her over the land 
past the sparkling, blue sea, which it ruffled until the 
waves dashed high on the rocks and coast. On, on, on 
it took her over the lowlands and mountains, lakes 
and rivers, while the clouds scudded underneath 
her. After an awful journey in the lap of the North 
Wind she came to the land of ice and snow. The 
blast, getting tired of its burden, set the child down 
not very gently on the same iceberg upon which 
the Three Gray Sisters lived. The ghostly creatures, 
scared by the sudden bump, set up a weird half -wail, 
half-scream which nearly petrified poor Pandora. 

"What is it? What is it?" cried the blind ones 
of their sister who possessed the eye. 

" 'Tis nothing but a shivering, whimpering child ! " 
she exclaimed harshly as she seized Pandora in her 
skinny hands and shook her as severely as she could. 
Then she handed the eye to the next creature, who 
dealt her some weak blows. The third crone, upon 
receiving the eye, only hurled questions at the girl. In 
that way she procured the story of Pandora's journey. 

" You deserve punishment, but I'll only keep you 
with us for a month!" she announced in her thin, 
rasping voice. ...... 



THE USES OF COMPOSITION 287 

Had it not been for Mercury poor Pandora might 
have had to stay with the old witches ; but he rescued 
her from their clutches and brought her back to 
Epimetheus, who was very worried indeed about her. 

Grade IX, Horace Mann School. 1917. 

SUMMARY 

We have seen that by their attempts to define in in- 
formal fashion the idea and fundamental impression of 
a book and to tell what in it most appeals to them, young 
pupils can be kept clear of indefmiteness and hazy or blur- 
red impressions, and from mere emotionalism or too rapid 
plot pursuing. The analysis we assign can of course be 
carried to any desired length in study of both matter and 
manner; but it should be centered upon a conception of 
the author's purpose and upon a sense of the actuality of 
the story and a comprehension of its idea. With such 
limitations, and always with entire informality in treat- 
ment and encouragement of every hint of individuality, 
reports and examinations may become not tedious and 
spirit-killing demands, but actual feeders of appreciation, 
enjoyable periods of living over again the best of a book 
one has found heartily good. 

Quite another way of approach to realization of liter- 
ature is to be found in children's writing of stories or verse 
in which they express after their own fashion the ex- 
periences and ideas which are real and important to them. 
I do not believe that the writing of imaginative narrative 
or of verse should ever be a requirement ; it should rather 
be always permissive, with the option of writing some 
wholly matter-of-fact incident. But even so, the imagin- 
ative types are usually attempted by the greater number, 
if not by all, of a class which has read stories or verse 
with enjoyment and realization. Forms and imitation of 
forms should never be prescribed, and rarely, I think, 



288 READING AND LITERATURE 

-even suggested; a child with an idea he wants to get ex- 
pressed will look about for a medium, and when he has 
made trial of one he will criticize it himself and will wel- 
come others' criticism. Thus he will gain an appreciation 
of literary forms impossible to one who must merely an- 
alyze them, or must imitate them in stupid and slavish 
fashion to meet a formal requirement. 



CHAPTER X 

EDUCATIONAL DRAMATIZATION AND 
DRAMATIC READING 

We have proposed that true comprehension or realiza- 
tion of stories of any sort means their "inner dramatizing" 
— the imaginative picturing of the scenes and persons and 
incidents. This is the sole reality of such reading; without 
this it is merely emotional excitement or quite meaning- 
less word-calling. Naturally one of the best ways of 
seeing that children have such imaginative power, and of 
helping them develop it, is their dramatic reading or 
dramatization of good narrative conversation. This must 
be in no case a dramatization by the teacher, in which the 
pupils do what he directs, speak after his inflections, and 
arrange their groupings and gestures at his dictation. 
Dramatization that is real and valuable must be in every 
case the children's own expression of what they see and 
hear and feel in reading the story. The crude and often 
absurd conception which a pupil expresses will be im- 
proved by the criticisms of other pupils who see the thing 
differently, and by that of the teacher, who may know 
better the purpose of the author and the life he presents. 

In particular, where a class are planning to give a 
dramatization for the whole school in assembly or for an- 
other class whom they entertain, they will certainly want 
to make it quite the best that they are collectively capable 
of. But the teacher must here take the greatest pains to 
see that his anxiety for a good appearance and for meeting 
the demands of supervisors and parents does not influence 
him to impose their standards or his own, to the cramping 
and distorting of the children's free expression of a story 
as they see it. The teacher or director should not, I think, 

19 289 



2 9 o READING AND LITERATURE 

do more than question : "Is that the way Feathertop 
would say that? He was supposed to be very stupid, 
wasn't he? " or " How do you think he would walk? " or 
" What sort of costumes did people really wear then? Do 
you know where you can find out ? " He can thus draw 
out the best interpretations the class are capable of making 
and help them to all available information on the subject. 

Of course he has the privilege, in reason, of suggesting 
his personal way of interpreting a speech or action. But 
he must be careful to see that his vigorous or magnetic 
personality does not override the pupils' honest best ideas 
and supplant their dramatization with an adult way of 
doing the thing, inappropriate to the children because im- 
posed, false and harmful because not developed out of their 
own ideas. When a pupil, after trying several ways of 
doing a thing, chooses one that his teacher considers in- 
ferior, or when a class select the person whom they con- 
sider the best in a part, these choices should prevail. But 
we must also remember that the chief good of really " edu- 
cational dramatics " is the development in interpretation 
and expression of individual children. We can make a 
genuine contribution to the social ideas of our pupils if we 
help them in choosing, not always the best person for a 
given part, but the one who promises most personal growth 
in his attempt to portray it adequately. 1 Above all, the 
whole preparation and performance must represent, not the 
teacher's ideas — even of social organization or growth — 
but the pupil's best expression of the story and of them- 
selves. Otherwise the dramatization loses educational 
significance and becomes merely an affair of marionettes 
upon jerked wires. 

The preparation of dramas for school production, 

1 Margaret M. Skinner: "Socializing Dramatic," English Journal 
(9, 448) ; an admirable discussion of this sort of work. 



EDUCATIONAL DRAMATIZATION 291 

great as are its values, should not be allowed to extend 
itself over a long time or to disarrange, for more than at 
most a period or two each, the classes in other subjects; 
in fact, where greater expenditure of time and effort is 
permitted, the values themselves are likely to disappear in 
a smoothed and over-polished production which expresses 
anything rather than the pupils' own conception of the 
story. The best interpretation that children can develop 
from the suggestions and materials available should be the 
sole idea, and no " idol of quick and perfect returns " 
should be allowed place in the scheme. Far better 
rough and animated dramatic reading in the classroom 
than any leaning toward adult-staged and finished per- 
formances. A great value of dramatization is its trans- 
mutation of the pupils' own crude and dim conceptions 
of a story into something more real and approximately 
true. But it must still be their own conception, and not 
that of someone else, or the whole process loses most or 
all of its value for the teaching of literature. 

EARLY DRAMATIZINGS PUPPET SHOWS AND PANTOMIMES 

One of the pleasantest and most unspoiled bits of 
dramatizing I have seen was done by two third-grade 
girls with their dolls and toy animals for characters. They 
sat openly on the part of the floor reserved for the stage 
and moved the toys about, making them take hold of cups 
and saucers, shake hands, or help each other put on bon- 
nets, and all the while talking for them. They gave Red 
Riding Hood in three scenes and The Princess and the 
Pea in two. This latter I found they liked heartily for 
some reason of their own, though of course they had no 
idea of the satire on royal extravagance and luxury which 
it contains. 2 

2 In the class of Miss Nell C. Curtis, of the Lincoln School, 
New York City. 



2 9 2 READING AND LITERATURE 

The little plays were typical of what can be done beau- 
tifully in kindergartens and primary grades, as in good 
homes, to make real the happenings in fairy tales and 
legends. Of course the children themselves as charac- 
ters are quite as delightful; but the advantage of the pup- 
pets is in a greater unconsciousness of self when the at- 
tention of the spectators is presumably centered on the 
dolls and oblivious of their managers. These puppet 
shows may be developed into actions on small stages with 
settings designed by the showmen or by older children, 
with puppet-actors moved by the hands of children below 
the stage. There may be most fantastic and various char- 
acters. Butterflies and fairies, or even the " persons " of 
the play, may be suspended by wires from above like true 
marionettes. Some first and second-grade children once 
made puppet-theaters of pasteboard suit box-covers, with 
a scene painted inside, and paper dolls let down on threads 
through slits in the upper side to carry on dramatic dia- 
logues, mostly quite bloody and dire. 3 

The following useful comment was supplied by Miss 
Ina M. Perego, the author of an article on " The Little 
Theater in the High School," listed in the bibliography 
for the chapter, 4, who was good enough to read and 
criticize this chapter in manuscript : 

"My experience with young children convinces me 
that, preliminary to the work you describe, the emphasis 
should be placed on pantomime : children in the kindergar- 
ten pantomiming nursery rhythms and short fairy tales 
and those in the first three grades giving original pan- 

3 In Miss Anna Gannett's and Miss Gail Harrisons classes, the 
Lincoln School. Help in making marionette theaters may be had 
from the Tony Sarg Marionette Book (Huebsch, 1921). 
4 Pp. 367, ff. 



EDUCATIONAL DRAMATIZATION 293 

tomimes from their own experiences, followed by pan- 
tomimes of stories found in their readers, etc. After the 
children have responded bodily to the events happening 
to the fictitious characters of their stories and to the 
living people of their acquaintance, then they may be 
encouraged to add dialogue to their scenes. Instead of 
stilted, painfully correct sentences delivered in a monot- 
onous voice, the teacher will hear tones, and inflections, 
and a style of delivery which vary with the feelings of 
the imagined character. 

"When you remember that Percival Chubb in Festivals 
and Plays emphasizes the value of pantomime in the lower 
grades, also that pantomime was the earliest form of 
drama (dialogue developing much later), and finally, that 
language itself originated in gesture, you will allow panto- 
mime to lay the cornerstone for the building of natural 
speech habits and of an appreciation for literature." 

A. INFORMAL DRAMATIC READING 
IN THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL 

Browning tells how the Siege of Troy was made real 
to him by dramatization in the library with his father's 
help — 

" that instructor sage 

My Father, who knew better than turn straight 
Learning's full flare on weak-eyed ignorance, 
Or, worse yet, leave weak eyes to grow sand-blind, 
Content with darkness and vacuity." 5 

It is such informal readings that make literature real in 
classroom or home. Most of the stories children read 
aloud can be thrown into some sort of dramatic form ; per- 

5 Robert Browning: "Development" — Poetical Works (Cam- 
bridge Edition) p. 1002. 



2 9 4 READING AND LITERATURE 

haps one child may be " The Book " and read whatever is 
not in quotation marks; better, the characters may sup- 
ply by action and voice what the " book " tells. So soon 
as a story has been repeated a time or two in this way, it 
can be done independently of the text, and will of course 
gain in vivacity and spontaneity by this, provided its repe- 
tition is not a mere requirement, but a pleasure to the chil- 
dren themselves, and provided intelligent variations from 
the book wording are always encouraged. I reprint here a 
full and unedited stenographic report of a third-grade les- 
son in dramatization. It was carried out in June, 191 6, at 
a public school in Milwaukee, under the direction of Miss 
Josephine Maloney, now of the Milwaukee State Normal 
training school. All but three or four pupils were of 
foreign parentage. They had not previously dramatized 
this story, but had read it. The specially commendable 
features of this play are: the method of choosing char- 
acters, so that each child voiced not his own qualifications, 
but those of someone else; the complete simplicity of 
setting — just what was on hand, with no costumes or 
properties save coats and hats and pointers; and the 
freedom from fixed wording, so that each actor interpo- 
lated or changed as he liked, subject, no doubt, to the 
criticism of the rest of the class. The lesson would have 
been a more satisfactory illustration if it had shown more 
of the frank criticism and discussion of various opinions 
that occurred in the same class at other times. The choices 
of characters and the interpretations of the scenes were 
subject often of differences of opinion and considerable 
discussion. Such a lesson does more literature teaching 
than any amount of study of words or constructions. To 
make the play clear and vivid to the audience and properly 
true in its interpretation requires and brings about all 
desirable attention to necessary details. 



EDUCATIONAL DRAMATIZATION 295 

A THIRD GRADE PLAY : " CARL AND HlS FRIENDS " 

Teacher : If you can plan to do it, you may 

play the story of " Carl and His 
Friends " for Miss D's room to- 
morrow. How many will help to 
plan the story? (All.) What 
must we think of before we be- 
gin playing? 

A : Characters. 

Teacher : We will have to have people, or A 

used a very good word, " charac- 
ters." What characters do we 
need in this story? 

B : Carl and three pigs and a donkey 

and a master, the worm and the 
old man and the rabbit. 

(Teacher writes the characters on the board as B 
names them.) 

C : We have to have a gate-keeper. 

Teacher: In choosing these characters, tell 

me why you choose them. 

D : I think we want John Brown for 

Carl because he can talk loud. 

Teacher: Another reason? 

E: He speaks right up. 

F: He doesn't forget his part and 

stumble. 
(Children agree upon John Brown for Carl.) 

G: I suggest Charles for the master 

because he can talk loud and 
knows his part, and he can act 
like Master. 



296 READING AND LITERATURE 

H : For the three pigs I would take 

three small boys. 

I : The Donkey ought to be Alex be- 

cause he can neigh like a donkey. 

J : I would like to hear Alex neigh. 

Teacher: Will you neigh for us, Alex? 

(Alex neighs.) 

J : I'm not satisfied with Alex's neigh 

because he says " B-a-a-a-a-a-a- 
a-a " instead of " A-a-a-a-a-a-a." 

(Alex neighs in the manner suggested by J.) 

Teacher: How many are satisfied with 

Alex's neighing? 
(After some practice, Alex neighs to the satisfaction 
of all.) 

K: I would choose Edwin for the Old 

Man because he can act as if he is 
lame and make believe he is a real 
old man. 

L: And for his eyes to be sore, he 

puts his hand before his eyes and 
his head down. 

M: I would like to see Edwin walk. 

(Edwin walks like an old man.) 

N : I would take Ethel for the Rabbit 

because she is small and spry. 

O : I would take James for the Worm 

because he can call out in a 
squeaky voice. 

P: I'd choose Eugene for the Man 

with the Book because he looks 
kind of wise. 



EDUCATIONAL DRAMATIZATION 297 



Teacher : 

B: 
Teacher 

B: 



I'd take William for the Gate- 
keeper because he stands up 
straight and tall as if he was 
a guard. 

What else do we need in playing 
the story? 



We'll need places. 

Has anyone a suggestion about 
where you want the different 
places? 

Carl right with the Master stand- 
ing beside the table, and the pigs 
over in the corner, and the Man 
with the Book ought to be in the 
middle of the room. 

C: The Worm ought to be under the 

sand table. And the old man 
who hasn't any shoes or hat 
should sit right in front of John's 
desk. (John's is the first seat in 
a row.) 

D: And the Rabbit ought to stand 

right next to Miss M's chair, so 
that he can hop in. And the Don- 
key can stand in the fifth aisle. 

E : The Gate-keeper could stand over 

near the ferns and have Harold's 
chair for the gate. 

Teacher: What must we think about now? 

What comes next? 

F: The acting and the talking. 

(The characters chosen for the play come up to the 
front of the room. The play begins.) 



298 READING AND LITERATURE 

Master: Carl, you have been my faithful 

swineherd for these three long 
years and I haven't paid you any- 
thing yet. You may take half of 
my swine and sell them, and half 
of the money will be your own. 

Carl: All my own! Well, I will take 

this pig and this pig and that pig. 
Three is one-half of six. All my 
own! All my own! 

(He goes to the table in the middle of the room, 
where the Man with the Book is seated.) 

Man with Book : Trying to peek into my book, 
aren't you ? 

Carl: Beg pardon, sir. 

Man with Book : No offense. Come and we will 

sit down and read. 
(Carl sits down next to Man with Book.) 

Carl: I can't see anything interesting 

in that. 

Man with Book : Can't you see anything interest- 
ing in it? 

Carl : Nothing but that gilt lettering. 

Man with Book : Why, that's a king's name. 

Carl: A king? I have been a swineherd 

for three long years and I haven't 
yet seen a king. Where is a king? 
I have wandered around here for 
seven long years and I have never 
seen a king. 

Man with Book : There's going to be one in the 
market place to-day. 



EDUCATIONAL DRAMATIZATION 299 

Carl : Then I must hurry. 

(As he goes along with his three pigs, three small 
boys, hopping after him, he meets a donkey.) 

Donkey neighing : A-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a (To Carl) : Carl, 
won't you help me home to my 
master with my load of sand? 

(Carl pushes him along a little way.) 

Carl : But now, just look the long ways 

I've pushed you. 

Donkey: A-a-a-a-a-a-a-a, Carl, I'll never 

get home to my master. 

Carl: Oh, well, he can't help being a 

donkey. (He pushes the donkey 
home.) Now my pigs are eating, 
so I'll eat my dinner, too. 

(He sits down to eat. Sees a rabbit coming from 
one side of the room.) 

I hope this rabbit doesn't ask me 
for anything. 

Rabbit: Oh, Carl, won't you give me 

something to eat? 

Carl : But look at all the nice clover 

around here. Why don't you 
eat that? 

Rabbit : The doctor says I mustn't eat the 

clover or else I'll get heartburn. 

Carl : She's sick and I'm not. 

(Throws the rabbit his dinner.) 
Rabbit: Thank you, Carl. 

Carl : You better be thankful, because I 

haven't got anything for myself. 
^Goes on and comes to an old man supposedly sitting 
under a tree.) 



3oo READING AND LITERATURE 

Carl: Why, you poor old man, is there 

anything I can do for you? 

Old Man : Oh, Carl, I've been walking in the 

sun all day and my feet are 
very sore. 

(Carl pretends to give him his shoes.) 

Carl : Is there anything else I can do 

for you? 

Old Man : Yes, Carl, my eyes are very sore. 

Carl : I'll give you my hat. I've had 

mine long enough, but my eyes 
will get sore too. 

Old Man : Thank you, Carl. 

Carl : Now, I must watch my pigs be- 

cause this is the enchanted cave 
and the hobgoblins will steal 
them if I don't watch out. 

(Cries are heard coming from under the sand table 

— the stone.) 

Carl ! Carl ! Won't you come and 
take me out? I'm here under 
this stone. 

Carl : But my pigs will get in the cave. 

Worm (under stone) : Carl ! Carl ! I'll be crushed to 
death if you don't get me out. 

Carl: Good-by, pigs. (Lifts the stone.) 

Worm: Thank you, Carl. 

(The pigs have disappeared under the table or the 
cave.) 

Carl: Well, now my pigs are gone, so 

I think I'll go to the market. 
(Walks to the center of the room, the market.) 



EDUCATIONAL DRAMATIZATION 301 

Gate-keeper: Where have you been to-day, 

Carl ? Come into the market place 
with me. 

Carl: I don't know. 

(As he enters, the Man with the Book meets him.) 

Man with Book : Carl, where have you been to-day ? 

Carl: I don't know. 

Man with Book : What have you been doing? 

Carl : Walking through the woods. 

(All the characters come up.) 

Donkey: A-a-a-a-a-a-a. Carl helped me 

with my load of sand. 

Rabbit: He gave me something to eat. 

Old Man : He gave me shoes and his hat. 

Worm : Carl helped me from being crushed 

to death under the stone. 

Man with Book : Citizens, what do you think of 

Carl? 

All : Carl is a king ! Carl is a king ! 

Carl: And I never knew it! 

IN THE HIGH SCHOOL 

Dramatic reading of what is suitable for such treat- 
ment is a most excellent aid to the schoolroom study of lit- 
erature in all grades and high school years. I have sug- 
gested that it furnishes useful motivation for reading aloud 
clearly and expressively. It requires of each pupil careful 
preparation, not alone of the part he wants to try, but of 
the entire story or play. The competition is very keen 
when a scene from Julius Ccesar, for example, is to be read 
thus. All want parts and try to get good ones. And to 
lose a part because of stumbling or stupid rendering is a 



3 o2 READING AND LITERATURE 

real disappointment ; it does not usually happen twice to 
the same pupil. As vivid and fruitful minutes may be had 
in class when Antony's speech is being read before a 
growling and tempestuous mob as any in the assembly 
plays, or indeed on any stage. Really difficult passages 
such as the discussions between Brutus and Cassius are 
attacked and presented with real comprehension, and the 
whole shows a life and fire which, we may guess, was 
what made the play popular at the Globe on the Bank- 
side. The tavern scene from Silas Marner and the dance 
at Squire Cass' house are usually considered dull and un- 
interesting for individual reading by children in eighth or 
ninth grade ; but when they read these in parts they usually 
enjoy the humor and see without any commentary the 
contribution of these scenes to understanding the vil- 
lage setting. 

But the limitations of this method must be clearly 
noted and respected. It should be obvious that only dra- 
matic narrative can be thus presented. A clever satire on 
"teaching devices" pictures one hobbyist as requiring a 
dramatization of Wordsworth's Daffodils; this reduces 
the idea to acute absurdity. 6 But almost as false attempts 
have been made in real schoolrooms that I have known. 
Whatever has dramatic quality that children can in some 
fashion express is grist for this particular mill. And 
clearly, for the elementary and junior high-school years 
this should be the greatly prevailing type of literature 
recommended and read. 

B. PREPARED DRAMATIZATIONS OF THE PUPIL* S OWN SENSE 
OF A NARRATIVE 

It is natural and highly desirable that children prepare 
such plays as they have heartily enjoyed for the entertain- 

6 Randolph C. Wilson: A Schoolboy's Nightmare: English Jour- 
nal 1,619. 



EDUCATIONAL DRAMATIZATION 303 

ment of some other class or of the school in assembly. 
School assemblies should, indeed, consist so far as pos- 
sible of quite free and voluntary presentations of this and 
other sorts. I have suggested that the danger enters here 
of formalizing and distorting children's interpretations to 
meet adult standards of excellence. But only when the 
scenes they give represent the pupils' own best effort to 
express ideas they have themselves got from their stories 
are these dramatizings truly educative and not mere 
formalities. This supposes a nice balance between unac- 
ceptable rawness and unfitness on the one hand, and value- 



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FIGURE 3. 







less prescribed and dictated " coached plays " on the other. 
What is given should be the best possible — but the chil- 
dren's own best, not a teacher's. The stimulus of meeting 
criticism of older classes who are naturally able to present 
what is more finished is the best guarantee against unac- 
ceptable rawness. No forcing or arbitrary direction should 
be necessary here. 

I should make it clear that all the plays which I shall 
tell about from my own experience have been given either in 
very cramped schoolrooms or in a small assembly room 
on a narrow stage (Fig. 3). This stage has no side en- 
trances, but only a flight of steps on either side. It is 
draped quite effectively with a dark blue curtain from the 
ceiling, hanging against the back wall and across the 
corners. The small triangular spaces thus provided are 



3 o 4 READING AND LITERATURE 

the only storage place for surplus actors or properties ; so 
sometimes we built a curtained or screened space for 
" wings " at the right of the stage where the steps 
come down. 

A front curtain about five and one-half feet high can be 
hung across the whole front of the stage when we need 
it. 7 The floor in front of the stage is sometimes cleared 
and used for a street or common, while the stage repre- 
sents a house. Naturally we can give nothing elaborate on 
such a scene, and this simplicity has been a chief artistic 
merit of these small dramatizings. 

It is hardly necessary to emphasize further the need 
and value of the greatest possible simplicity in such work, 
whether in grades or high school. A beautiful example is 
given of the effectiveness possible in such fashion in the 
presentations of plays by Mr. Merrill, of the Francis 
Parker School, Chicago. 8 Footlights are decidedly out of 
place in such presentations. Curtains of canton flannel 
dyed green or cobalt blue, stenciled designs in gold or 
silver on costumes or painted embroidery designs, and 
the like, represent excellent inexpensive materials. "While 
harmony of color is most important, richness of material 
is not at all necessary. The simplest and most inexpen- 
sive fabrics, like cheesecloth and cambric, may be used 
with good effect. Cambric is a good substitute for silk, 
cotton flannel for velvet, and cheap Japanese crepes for 
brocade. Diamonds and other jewels can be represented 
by rhinestones and colored glass. Ermine finds a sub- 
stitute in strips of cotton batting inked or painted with 
dashes of black. Sandals may be made from lamb's wool 

7 I am indebted to Professor H. L. Miller, of the University of 
Wisconsin, for the suggestion that audiences of young people are 
held to more sustained interest when the stage is always in view, 
as it was in Elizabethan times. Most plays can be adapted to 
these conditions. 

s John Merrill: "Drama and the School "—especially Part II, 
" Stage Settings " in the Drama for November, 1919 (10: 22 and 66). 



EDUCATIONAL DRAMATIZATION 305 

soles with long strips of braid for lacings. Crowns, 
buckles, swords, helmets, shields, dishes, and vases can 
be made of cardboard or brown wrapping paper, then 
covered with gold or silver paper." 9 

EXAMPLES OF STAGE SETTINGS FOR PLAYS 10 

For dramatization of the Aladdin story by an eighth 
grade, simple settings and costumes were made quite 
effective. The blue-hung stage, darkened, represented the 
cave ; when the magician opened it the stereopticon threw 
a patch of light in which Aladdin entered and secured the 
lamp. When he was shut in, darkness fell until the jinn 
appeared summoned by the ring, and then the light fell on 
this apparition. The palace was the same stage, with two 
cushions as seats; but a hole in the rear curtain, backed 
with another piece of blue, was reserved for magic uses. 
When Aladdin ordered the jinn to provide the new palace, 
a picture of it, distant and gorgeous in perspective draw- 
ing, rose obedient to unseen strings. Later it vanished 
by the same means, to reappear at dire need. The cos- 
tumes were bright-colored bloomers and turbans; the 
sultan's vizier wore a rose-colored boudoir-robe lent by 
the art teacher. Two jinn appeared in brown tights and 
gymnasium trunks wth turbans about their heads. The 
effects were such as any school might duplicate easily. 
Mr. H. Caldwell Cook tells how two or three 
swords and cloaks served as most of the needed properties 
for dramatizing in class the Shakespeare plays read. 11 

8 Fom a note prefacing The King's Jester and Other Short Plays 
for Small Stages, by Carol Atherton Dugan (Boston, '99). 

"Whatever was artistic in all these settings was due most to 
my former colleague, Miss Ethelwyn Bradish, the teacher of fine 
a r*5 ** T *} e Lin coln School, New York City; the hearty cooperation 
of Miss Florence Winchell in the sewing room and Mr. A. O. Edger- 
ton in the shops, and the cordial support of Miss Anne Eaton from 
the library, were likewise invaluable. 

" H. Caldwell Cook : The Play Way, p. 190 ff . The entire book, 
and in particular Chapters 7 and 9, should be read as an excellent 
view of boys and literature in natural relations. 



3 o6 READING AND LITERATURE 

For a ninth-grade play, The Return of Odysseus, the 
setting was equally simple, but more laborious to contrive. 
The first scene occurred in the swineherd's hut and con- 
sisted merely of a narrow space at the center of the stage, 
between two screens. The other two scenes were in the 
palace at Ithaca. Two high columns built of half barrel- 
heads and laths stood one in either corner ; the front cur- 
tain had been draped from the ceiling, with much difficulty, 
in order to conceal these columns from the front during 
the hut scene. Stools were the only furnishings. The 
costumes were designed and draped in the fine-arts class, 
after suggestions in costume plates at the museum. Their 
effect against the dark curtain was striking : the colors were 
harmonizing dark reds, mustard-yellows, and greens, 
simply draped, with one wool caftan, striped black and 
white, for Antinous. The beggar's dull rags were re- 
lieved in effect by a silver scarf thrown over him at the 
recognition and the appearance of Athene. The whole 
was exceedingly simple, but truly effective in color 
and movement. 

COOPERATION IN WORKING ON PLAYS 

It is of the greatest value to have every department 
join heartily in the production of plays of this sort. 
The fine arts teachers are of course particularly helpful and 
necessary; the success of a simple play of this sort is 
largely dependent on the effective use of color and placing 
for the picture effect of the stage. Everybody will be called 
upon before the performance is completed: the music 
teacher for songs and choruses and incidental music ; the 
art teacher for planning and designing costumes, settings, 
and groupings; the sewing rooms for making and re- 
making costumes ; the shop for varied properties ; the his- 
tory teachers for criticising and suggesting authentic 
touches; the school or local museum for pictures, and 



EDUCATIONAL DRAMATIZATION 307 

books of design and period decoration. Rightly completed 
dramas represent the best effort of the children — their idea 
developed as far as they themselves are able to develop 
it through all available suggestions and materials and 
criticisms. The remarkable way in which children take 
the most searching and severe cricitism, and work un- 
weariedly and painfully at their highest stretch of effort 
through long hours and days, is a constant surprise even 
to one who has seen it done again and again. 

SETTINGS FOR STORY-TELLING OR SPEECH 

A very worthy and useful sort of dramatizing for the 
grades is devising good settings for story-telling at as- 
semblies or for special occasions. The same third-grade 
class that devised the puppet shows made a quite elab- 
orately decorative setting as Sinbad's house; this they 
worked out with the cooperation of the teacher of fine arts, 
designing and selecting the most pleasing combinations 
and placing of color. The scene opened with only a nar- 
row space visible in front of two screens which shut off the 
main stage. To an accompaniment of oriental-sounding 
music Hinbad the Porter staggered in and set down his 
burden while he complained of his hard lot. Presently a 
servant summoned him to the presence of Sinbad, and the 
screens were removed to disclose a magnificent court in 
statuesque poses. There Hinbad was welcomed, and sat 
to hear a tale of one of Sinbad's voyages. Though most 
effective, the setting and the whole plan were simple, and 
developed wholly from the pupils' own ideas. 12 

Another setting, devised for part of a Lincoln's Birth- 
day program given by a seventh grade, was planned to in- 
troduce the Gettysburg Address. We collected some good- 
looking hoop-skirt costumes for the girls, and the boys 
wore stocks, long narrow trousers, and high hats bor- 

"The work of Miss Nell Curtis and Miss Bradish. 



308 READING AND LITERATURE 

rowed here and there. The scene opened just as Everett 
concluded his address, and the dialogue here reproduced 
preceded and followed Lincoln's address, given by a ninth- 
grade boy. I give first a selection from the individual 
attempts at the scene made by each pupil in the class. 
These furnished the material from which the performance 
itself grew. Thus the development of the dramatization 
may be observed from mere recital of Lincoln anecdotes 
with little pertinence, to what seems, in a simple and naive 
way to sum up well what these children considered the real 
greatness of Lincoln. The material is intended not as a 
play, but as a setting for the speech. It is given here, not be- 
cause it is unusual or a model, but simply as the sort of 
thing that seventh-grade children anywhere can be ex- 
pected to do without dictation and autocratic direction 
from anyone, but with their own best effort in creation and 
criticism of one another and with the helpful suggestions 
and encouragement of their teachers in all departments. 

Here is one sample of the original attempts by in- 
dividual pupils in seventh grade to write a suit- 
able setting : 

THE GETTYSBURG ADDRESS 

(Everett gets down off the platform. Cheers.) 

Bill: Wuf! That's over! 

Sim : It was awfully long. Wonder what 

Lincoln is going to say. 
Tom: I guess his speech won't be very 

good. Someone kick Al there. He's 

gone to sleep. 

Al: (Stretching) Oh hum! Has Lincoln begun yet? 

Newcomer 13 Heah, friends, could you tell me 

something about this Lincoln man? 

13 Suggested by this boy, in the preliminary discussion, as a person 
to whom things might be explained ; intended here to be an Englishman. 



EDUCATIONAL DRAMATIZATION 309 

I 'm a stranger, and I never heard of 

him before. 
Jim : Why, don't you know who Lincoln 

is? He was a backwoodsman out 

in Illinois. He got to studying law, 

and now he's President. 
Bill : I used to be a neighbor of his. Once 

he ruined a whole new suit of 

clothes getting a pig out of a hole 

in the mud. 
Tom : Once he walked seven miles to give 

back change of three cents. 
An Old Woman : Yes ; why, once he spared my son 

from being shot for sleeping on 

his post. 
Stranger : Well ! Well ! He must be some 

' man. 

Al : Silence. Here he is. 

(Lincoln ascends the platform.) 

Lincoln : Fourscore and seven years ago, etc. 

(Lincoln having finished, descends.) 

Foreigner: Wonderful. Simply astounding! 

Tom: Well, I'll be . . .!! 

Jim : That's some speech ! 

Bill : Why, I never knew he could talk 

that way. 

When this and other plays were read in class, some 
pupils made the criticism that Lincoln's real greatness was 
not shown by the incidents related. Thereupon the 
author added the following sentences to the play 
just quoted: 

Stranger : But is he considered great merely 

because he is kind to animals, etc.? 



3 to READING AND LITERATURE 

Jim : Oh, my no ! He is a very great man ; 

not at all proud or anything-. 

This is merely a sample of the average of individual 
attempts ; the others varied in detail, but were only slightly 
better or poorer in effect. One or two introduced a negro 
with spurious dialect and nothing particular to say. One 
boy of mechanical turn had Lincoln delayed by a hot box on 
his train, so that he could explain what a hot box is. 
Another attributed the following speech to Dennis Hanks, 
whom several of the plays introduced : " One time he 
pulled a pig out of a hole with his best clothes on. Not the 
pig had his best clothes on, Lincoln did." 

The comments on Lincoln's speech, too, were of the 
sort recorded above, exclamatory and at a loss. The idea 
finally selected for the play, of having complete silence at 
the conclusion of the speech, was based on stories of the 
occasion. It was suggested in the following form. " There 
is perfect silence. Not a hand is raised to applaud. Every- 
one is dumfounded by its preciseness, conciseness, and sin- 
cereness." All the pupils tried to supply an adequate view 
of Lincoln's greatness. One wrote, " His main will is to 
free the nation, whether he frees the slaves or not." The 
speech finally chosen for this purpose is that given to Mrs. 
Gleason in the play as presented. It is, I trust, quite clear 
that this play is not presented as a full and matured appre- 
ciation of Lincoln and of the situation. It is somewhat 
stiff and very serious, quite disdaining the rather good 
and natural humor of some earlier versions. But it was 
the earnest best of the pupils who gave it, and such a 
creditable performance as seventh-graders in general may 
be expected to compass. 



EDUCATIONAL DRAMATIZATION 311 



The scene follows just as it was given : 



THE GETTYSBURG ADDRESS 

Time: November 19, 1863 
Place : The Battlefield of Gettysburg 
Characters 

Edward Everett 
Abraham Lincoln 
Private Hicks 
Lord Stevens 
Mrs. Jones 
Mr. Smith (farmer) 
Mr. Johnson 
Mrs. Brown 
Miss O'Bryan 
Mrs. Gleason 
Mr. Williams 
Mr. Everett bows and leaves the platform. Applause. 
Mr. Johnson : That certainly was a fine speech, 

but it was a little too long. 
Mrs. Jones : Yes, but I reckon we will have a few 

minutes before Mr. Lincoln speaks. 
Lord Stevens : Pardon me, but will anyone tell me 
about Mr. Lincoln? I know your 
President was born in the back- 
woods of Kentucky, and worked his 
way up until he became President. 
But why do you think he is such a 
wonderful man? 
Mrs. Brown : I know a little story that shows Mr. 
Lincoln's kindness. Once when 
Mr. Lincoln was going to a very 
important meeting he found two 
little birds lying on the ground. 
They had fallen out of their nests. 
He stopped and picked them up, 
keeping the meeting waiting. 
Doesn't that prove his kindness? 



312 



READING AND LITERATURE 



Private Hicks: My comrade, Private Greene, fell 
asleep at his post the first time he 
was serving as a sentinel. He was 
court-martialed and sentenced to 
be shot at sunrise. 

MissO'Bryan: Oh, was he shot? How dreadful! 

Private Hicks: No, his parents appealed to Mr. 
Lincoln, and though the Secretary 
of War, Mr. Stanton, wanted him 
shot, Mr. Lincoln overruled him 
and insisted upon the boy's being 
pardoned. 

Mr. Williams : So he did escape after all. 

Private Hicks : He was killed the next day, but he 
died honorably on the battlefield. 

Lord Stevens : Yes, I know he's kind, but why do 
you think he is so great? 

Mr. Smith : Lincoln's aim and ambition is to 

save the Union. If he could have 
saved the Union without this war 
he would have done it. 

Mrs. Gleason : He has suffered for the greater 
things in life, and reached them. He 
has held our Union together. He has 
made himself precious to all of us. 

Mr. Hanks : Everybody be still ; Mr. Lincoln 

is going to speak now. 

The Gettysburg Address. At the end there is com- 
plete silence. 

Lincoln (leaving the platform, speaks to his secre- 
tary.) I knew the speech would be 
a failure. 

Secretary : I think they didn't applaud because 

they were so impressed, sir. 

(Finally Lord Stevens breaks the silence — in an awed 
voice) : My word, I never heard a speech to equal 
that in all my life. Lincoln has proved to be the 
most wonderful man I ever saw. 



EDUCATIONAL DRAMATIZATION 313 

" THE LIGHTING AND EXTINCTION OF FEATHERTOP " 

Feathertop was given by ninth grade who had pro- 
duced no play during the previous year and were eager to 
show the other classes what they could do. As they and 
another class were giving a Halloween party, I read them 
the greater part of Hawthorne's Feathertop one class hour, 
and they took up eagerly my suggestion that they try 
dramatizing it. As soon as copies of the book could be 
secured each pupil wrote the setting, action, and dialogue 
for one of the scenes ; the original plan was to have two, 
the making of Feathertop and his exposure at Justice 
Gookin's. But presently someone suggested his return 
and collapse at the witch's house, and this was written 
by two pupils. A street scene was also developed to in- 
clude all the class who had not major parts. As the pages 
brought in were read in class, the best lines were selected, 
and improved by suggestions made at the time. Each 
pupil did a satisfactory piece of work on this part of 
the project. 

The outstanding value of the play in my view was its 
remarkable development of a boy who had taken little part 
in the English work, read slowly and painfully, though 
he was quick enough in scientific reading and laboratory 
work, and had been more or less disregarded by the rest. 
When the parts were being read he tried for Feathertop 
in the final scene, read it with enthusiasm, threw away and 
broke the scarecrow's pipe, and collapsed in such an in- 
extricable heap of long legs and arms that he drew spon- 
taneous applause. Two boys, of course, had a chance at 
the part in rehearsals, but there was little question from 
that hour as to the final choice. For every other part there 
was rather lively competition; in each case the class de- 
cision confirmed my own. 



314 READING AND LITERATURE 

As in all our plays, many changes were made while the 
rehearsals progressed.-" The number of lines added to the 
original play probably doubled its length. In the 
scene at Justice Gookin's a part was wanted for another 
girl, and so she went on as Polly's younger sister, of 
shrewish temper, and .the two improvised a dialogue that 
stood substantially in the final ^lay... Everybody was in 
the street scene, either looking from the stage — the jus- 
tice's house — or walking about the front of the assembly 
room floor, which represented the highway. Two girls 
devised in rehears^ % drogue re* .evening this scene, 
coming to call their protesting husbands to dinner. 

One rehearsal, attended by* £vei*yfoody* on a Saturday 
morning, stays in my mind as a particularly jolly affair, 
so live was it with new and appropriate " business." In 
constructing her scarecrow, for instance, the witch acci- 
dentally upset a stool ; she at once seized it and pretended 
to wrench it apart for " this broken rung of a chair." In 
holding the broom, which was to be his backbone, she 
chanced to let go of it with the hand toward the audience 
and raise it with the one farther away, so that it seemed 
about to spring from her. This chance we utilized to add 
the line, " Come back here! " to suggest the broom as a 
restive steed. This broom, as can b"e seen in the pictured 
setting, was made of a bundle of brush wired on a mop- 
stick. In this same rehearsal Feathertop's collapse was 
made almost ghastly by black smears about his mouth and 
by a fit of choking and coughing, caused by a pencil he had 
in his mouth in place of the pipe which he had broken. 

In the conversation between Feathertop and Polly 
Gookin the line about Polly's voice, " It looms on the 
night," was written seriously by one of the girls in an at- 
tempt at fine dialogue. It was so comic that it was kept, 




FEATHERTOP IN HIS GLORY 




FEATHERTOP EXPOSED BY THE MAGIC MIRROR 



EDUCATIONAL DRAMATIZATION 315 

and made the occasion of the equally absurd reply, " Oh, 
no ! you are much, much taller than I ; come to the mirror 
and see! " to get the two before the magic glass. Other 
changes were made as we concluded work on the play, such 
as the addition of Feathertop' s bombastic introduction of 
himself from MacKaye's The Scarecrow and, at our libra- 
rian's suggestion, of the witch stanzas from Shakespeare 
and Middleton. These are perhaps sufficient illustrations 
of the way the play grew. I am sure that no more than 
six recitation periods were given to the entire planning, 
writing, and staging, in addition to perhaps three hours 
after school, two Saturday mornings, and several periods 
in the sewing room, the wood-shop, and the fine-arts room. 
The simplicity of the setting can be seen from the illus- 
trations. The witch's hut was simply the bare stage with 
a red-paper fireplace and a stool. 14 A clothes-tree with two 
arms was made as a basis for the scarecrow ; painted black, 
it hardly showed against the curtain in a dim light, and the 
effect of stick arms and legs hung on it was quite eerie. 
For the justice's drawing room we needed only a chair, a 
settee, and a mirror- frame with an extra blue-cloth cur- 
tain behind it, concealing the real scarecrow. The frame 
was made by Feathertop himself; gilded and ornamented 
with sawed scrolls and rococo ornaments in black paint, 
it was quite palatial. As often before, we used the stere- 
opticon for a spot-light, and added a bulb and reflector in 
the " wings." Pumpkins set about the assembly-room 
were also illuminated with electric lights. Feathertop had 
a tiny bulb, covered with red tissue paper, in his huge pipe, 
wired to a switch beneath his ruffles and a small pocket 
battery. An eighth-grade boy wrote that he thought the 
" atmosphere " of this play unusually good ; " by atmos- 

14 We received from an absent pupil, too late to use it, the sug- 
gestion that we have this scene in a cornfield and have a corn-shock 
dressed as Feathertop, who could emerge in person from it. 



316 READING AND LITERATURE 

phere I mean the lighting." Buckles for shoes were cut 
out of tin ; red breeches were made in the sewing class ; 
white stockings, knee breeches, whatever old-style dresses 
were brought in, and old felt hats folded in three-cornered 
shape, comprised the costuming. Feathertop managed to 
get an old dress-suit and sewed gold braid in fancy pat- 
erns all over its front ; this with a yellow vest and lace 
ruffles completed his outfit. As seemed proper, his star 
was not particularly brilliant ! 

Like most stage-transfers of the sort, the substitution 
of the real actor for the dressed clothes-tree with pumpkin 
top was a bit evident; the hero's white stockings glowed 
and twinkled in entering. Then, even though the spotlight, 
which alone illuminated this scene, was not turned on him 
till he came forward at the witch's terrible summons, he 
appeared from the start different from the imitation of 
himself that had stood in his place. But the little play was 
effective because it was a genuine interpretation, and de- 
veloped with earnest effort and great good- will. To me 
its highest value was the emergence of a boy who had 
been a problem, as a really clever comedian and a whole- 
hearted worker, with real appreciation and adaptability 
that he had never shown. He carried the responsibility 
of most of the play and worked vigorously, but the coop- 
eration of the rest of the class was also earnest and 
well sustained. 

The following program of the entire party was worked 
up in class and printed in the shop, with the jack-o-lanterns 
made on linoleum blocks. The players decided not to print 
their individual names, but to give all honor to the class. 
The odd wording of the legend for the first scene resulted 
from a combination of "In which a witch does the im- 
possible," and "In which a scarecrow is lighted"; the 
result is rather cryptic. 



EDUCATIONAL DRAMATIZATION 317 

HALLOWEEN FROLIC 

The Lincoln High School 

October 30, 1919 

Part I 

THE LIGHTING AND EXTINCTION OF 

FEATHERTOP 

by the Ninth Grade 

Scene 1. 

The Witch's Cave 

In which the impossible is lighted. 

Scene 2. 
Judge Gookin's House. 
? 

Scene 3. 

The Witch's Cave. Poor Feathertop ! ! 

Part II 

HALLOWEEN STUNTS 

The Eighth Grade 






THE FEATHERTOP PLAY 



ACT I 

Scene 1. 

Scene in a witch's hut or cave; the stage dark 
and misty — light from back of auditorium only. A 
broomstick in a corner and an old pumpkin-head and 



3 i8 READING AND LITERATURE 

sticks of wood strewn on the floor. In one corner a 
clothes rack with two arms. Mother Rigby, the 
witch, wearing a dark cape and under it a bright 
orange waist, sits with an old pipe in her mouth. 
Mother Rigby: Dickon, a coal for my pipe! (A 
flare lights up the stage (stereopti- 
con turned on) and the witch puffs 
at her pipe.) Good. Thank you, 
Dickon. And now for this scare- 
crow. Be within call, Dickon, in 
case I need you. (She yawns.) Oh 
me! I got up so early this morning 
to make this scarecrow. Goodness 
knows I need one, to scare away 
those pesky birds that try to eat my 
nice young corn. (She puffs at her 
pipe and sits on the stool.) I don't 
want to set up a hobgoblin in my 
own cornpatch, almost at my door- 
step. I could make one to frighten 
the parson himself if I pleased; but 
I'm tired of doing marvellous things, 
and so I'll keep within the bounds of 
everyday business just for variety's 
sake. (Pauses.) Besides, there's 
no use in scaring the little children 
for miles about, though it's true I'm 
a witch. (She thinks.) I'll just let 
my scarecrow represent a fine 
gentleman of this period. 

(She puts down her pipe and 
takes the broomstick.) Ah, many's 
the fine ride I've had on this. Come 
back here! (As it seems to move 
away.) This will be his back-bone. 
(Then she goes to woodpile.) This 
flail (two sticks jointed together) 
which belonged to my poor Good- 



EDUCATIONAL DRAMATIZATION 319 

man Rig-by, will be one arm, while 
(she takes stick from woodpile and 
rung from stool) this pudding stick 
and broken rung of a chair will serve 
as his other arm. (She takes other 
pieces from woodpile and hangs them 
on clothes tree. She picks up a bag 
of straw from the floor, and the 
pumpkin head, which she puts on 
and carves a face. She then stands 
back to view her work.) I've seen 
worse heads on human shoulders, at 
any rate. And many a fine gentle- 
man has a pumpkin head as well as 
my scarecrow. 

And now for the clothes. (She 
takes a coat off the clothes rack, then 
produces a vest, a pair of trousers, 
and silk stockings.) These clothes, 
my fine fellow, are very respect- 
able, expensive, and historic clothes. 
Therefore you are lucky to be able 
to wear them. These breeches (she 
holds them up) were worn by the 
French Governor of Louisbourg. (As 
she puts on each thing she looks at 
it, making a remark such as "hm", 
"ah", "hem", or chuckling. When 
she finishes she takes a wig and 
three-cornered hat, with feather in 
it, off the rack. Finally she steps 
away and looks at the completed 
figure admiringly.) You are well 
worth looking at, that's a fact. I've 
made many a puppet since I've been 
a witch, but methinks this is the 
finest of them all. 'Tis almost too 
good for a scarecrow. By the by, 



32o READING AND LITERATURE 

(she takes her pipe) I'll just fill a 
fresh pipe of tobacco, and then take 
him out to the cornpatch. (She 
takes the tobacco, still looking at 
the figure with great admiration, 
spills some, as she is not watching 
herself, but finally fills her pipe.) 
Dickon, another coal for my pipe ! 
(As the flare comes up again, some 
one dressed just like the scarecrow 
quickly changes places with it. The 
witch looks at the scarecrow again.) 

That puppet yonder is too good 
a piece of work to stand all summer 
in a cornpatch frightening birds. 
He's capable of better things. What 
if I should let him take his chance 
among other fellows of straw and 
emptiness who go bustling about 
in the world? (Takes three or four 
whiffs of her pipe.) He'll meet 
plenty of his brethren at every street 
corner. Well, I didn't mean to go 
any further in witchcraft to-day 
than lighting my pipe; but since I'm 
a witch and shall always be a witch, 
I might as well use some of my 
witchcraft. I'll make a man of my 
scarecrow, were it only for the joke's 
sake! (She takes pipe out of her 
mouth and puts it in the scarecrow's.) 

Puff, darling, puff. Puff away, 
my dear fellow. (She looks ex- 
citedly at the scarecrow, who puffs 
feebly at first, then harder and 
harder until he gets to puffing quite 
well. Mother Rigby smiles.) Puff 
away, pretty one. Your life depends 



EDUCATIONAL DRAMATIZATION 321 

upon it, and that you may take my 
word for. (Scarecrow puffs vigor- 
ously and succeeds in blowing forth 
a lot of smoke. She clasps her 
hands.) Methinks ye are beginning 
to look quite human, and your body 
is sturdier. (Figure puffs again.) 
Well puffed, my pretty lad. Come, 
another good, stout puff. Your life 
depends upon it, I tell thee. Puff out 
of the bottom of thy heart if thou 
hast any heart or any bottom to it. 
(Figure puffs again.) Well done 
again ! Thou did'st suck in that mouth- 
ful as for the pure love of it. 

(She beckons with witchlike 
gestures to the figure and steps 
backwards. The figure does not 
budge. She becomes angry.) Why 
lurkest thou in the corner, lazy one? 
Step forth ! Thou hast the world be- 
fore thee. (She beckons again, and 
the scarecrow takes one step for- 
ward, very unsteadily and awk- 
wardly. It doubles up and almost 
falls to the floor. The witch scowls, 
gets angrier, and still beckons.) 

The scarecrow takes another hitchy, 
jerky step, and again almost col- 
lapses. The witch stamps her foot 
and speaks angrily and shrilly.) 
Puff away, wretch. Puff, PUFF, 
PUFF! Thou thing of straw and 
emptiness ! Thou meal bag ! Thou 
rag or two! Thou pumpkin-head! 
Thou nothing! (Each word gets 
louder.) Puff, I say, puff in thy fan- 
tastic life along with the smoke; else 



322 



READING AND LITERATURE 



will I take thy pipe from thee and fling 
thee where the red coal came from. 
(The figure puffs violently till the 
room is filled with vapor. The 
witch shakes a fist at the hapless 
scarecrow.) 

Thou hast the aspect of a man; 
have also the echo and mockery of 
a voice. (Then commandingly) I 
bid thee SPEAK! (The scarecrow 
makes an attempt, gurgles, and 
finally says in a feeble voice, by 
turns falsetto and deep :) 

Feathertop : Mother, be not so awful with me. I 
would fain speak, but being without 
wits, what can I say? 

Mother Rigby: (Eagerly). Thou can'st speak, dar- 
ling, can'st thou? (Her grimness 
vanishes, leaving a smile.) And if 
thou can'st speak thou shalt babble 
like a mill-stream if thou wilt. Thou 
hast brains enough for that, I trow. 
With only a half-dozen words you 
can take your part in any society. 
You must say " Really ! Indeed ! 
Pray tell me ! Is it possible ! Upon 
my word ! By no means ! Ah ! Hem ! " 
and such other weighty things. 

Feathertop: (Rapidly and without expression.) 
Really — indeed — pray tell me — is it 
possible — upon my word — by no 
means — oh — hem — yah — at your ser- 
vice, Mother. 

Mother Rigby : That was well said, my pet. And 
now, darling, take heed to what I 
say. I love thee better than any 
witch's puppet. I have made many, 
but thou art the very best. So give 
heed to what I say. 



EDUCATIONAL DRAMATIZATION 323 

Feathertop : With all my heart, mother. 

Mother Rigby: (Laughing.) With all thy heart, in- 
deed ! (She gets a bundle of papers.) 
Now listen: Thou must go forth 
in the world and play the part of a 
nobleman. I have income enough 
from a mine — in Eldorado, a vine- 
yard — at the North Pole, and a 
chateau — in Spain, all of which are 
now yours. With these riches you 
will be among the best of them. 
Here is a little handy brass that will 
take you around the world. (She 
tacks it on his forehead.) 

Feathertop: Yes, please, mother. 

Mother Rigby : And listen. 

Feathertop : Pray tell me. 

Mother Rigby : One gentleman, Judge Gookin, in 
Salem, has a pretty daughter. 

Feathertop : Indeed? (Mother Rigby gets a stool, 
pushes Feathertop off when he tries 
to sit on it, and climbs upon it to 
speak in his ear.) 

Mother Rigby : You have only to say these words to 
Justice Gookin, or any person in 
authority, and he will grant what- 
ever you may ask. (She whispers.) 
(Feathertop moves his lips, though 
still smoking his pipe, and counts 
off the words on his fingers.) And 
thou hast a fair outside and a 
pretty wit. Yea, a pretty wit 
enough. Now with a fair inside and 
out thou art the man to win any 
young girl's heart. Put a bold face 
on, sigh, smile, flourish, put thy 
right hand to the left side of thy 
waistcoat, and pretty Polly Gookin 



3 2 4 READING AND LITERATURE 

is thine own. (As she says this the 
scarecrow tries to dance and flour- 
ish, but begins to flop. She quickly 
takes the pipe out of his mouth, rills 
it with tobacco, and calls) Dickon, 
another coal for my pipe. (Room 
flares again. While she fills the 
pipe the scarecrow gets limp and 
flabby. She puts the pipe in his 
mouth, and after a few puffs he is all 
right again.) Now, mine own, 
whatever happens to thee thou must 
never let go of thy pipe. Thy life is 
in it. If questions be asked, say it 
is for thy health, and if it gets low, 
go in some corner and say, " Dickon, 
some fresh tobacco, and Dickon, an- 
other coal for my pipe." Put it 
speedily to thy mouth; else, instead 
of a fine nobleman, you will be 
nothing but a bundle of rags and 
sticks with an old withered pumpkin 
for a head. (Feathertop looks hor- 
rified.) Take heed to what I say, 
and now depart. May luck go with 
you. Take my staff, and be your 
name Feathertop, for you have a 
feather in your hat. 

Feathertop : Oh ! 

Mother Rigby : Also, my son, beware of a certain 
mirror in Judge Gookin's house. It 
reveals to every one his real person- 
ality. So be careful. (Feathertop 
shows terror. She watches him go- 
ing. At the door he turns.) 

Feathertop : Farewell, mother, and if ever a pup- 
pet thrive, I shall. (He goes out.) 

Mother Rigby (Sitting down) : Well, Feathertop, 



EDUCATIONAL DRAMATIZATION 325 

I hope my enchantments go well 
with thee. 
Curtain. 

ACT 11 

Scene 1. 
A street in front of Justice Gookin's house (the as- 
sembly floor in front of the closed curtain) ; a 
bench in the center. Several gentlemen enter 
and confer in pantomime. Enter Mrs. Dale and 
Mrs. Cory. 

Oh, here comes the old women ! 
(To Mr. Mather and others). Good- 
morrow, good-morrow. (To Mr. 
Cory) When are you men coming 
home to dinner? 

Yes indeed, it's after half-past 
twelve. (They seize their husbands 
by ears or coat-lapels.) 
(Excitedly.) Oh! who can that be? 
(Enter Feathertop with grand and 
stiff-legged gait.) 

(With awe.) It is some great noble- 
man, beyond question. Do you see 
the star on his breast? 
Nay, it is too bright to be seen ! Yes, 
he must needs be a nobleman, as you 
say. He has the old Norman blood in 
his veins, I warrant him. 
I rather take him to be a Spaniard, 
and hence his yellow complexion. 
Yellow or not, he is a beautiful man ! 
So tall, so slender ; such a fine, noble 
face, with so well shaped a nose! 
And bless me, how bright his star 
is ! It positively shoots out flames ! 
(Who has been walking up and 
down) So do your eyes, fair lady! 



Mr. Dale : 
Mrs. Cory 



Mrs. Dale: 



Mr. Mather 



Mr. Cory : 



Mrs. Dale 



Mr. Dale 



Mrs. Dale: 



Feathertop : 



326 READING AND LITERATURE 

Upon my honor, they have quite 
dazzled me! 

Polly Gookin : (At the window, peering through 
the curtain) Who is that stranger 
coming down the street? Methinks 
I have not seen him in our city. 

Jane: I know not. How should I know, 

goose! (Feathertop goes to the 
door of Justice Gookin's house. Be- 
fore knocking he shakes the ashes 
out of his pipe and calls out some- 
thing sharply.) 

Mr. Dale : What did he say in that sharp tone 

of voice? 

Mr. Cory : Nay, I know not. But see ! he seems 

to fade away, and to collapse ! (The 
pipe is relighted, and Feathertop 
instantly resumes his former shape.) 

Mrs. Dale : Faded, you say ? Why, he seems to 

be even brighter than he was before, 
if that be possible. (Feathertop 
knocks, and Justice Gookin comes 
to the door.) 

Justice Gookin : (Gruffly.) Who knocks? 

Feathertop : Feathertop, sir ! Lord Feathertop, 
Prince of Cordova, Duke of Oxford, 
and Elector of Worms. (He leans 
over and whispers something in 
Justice Gookin's ear.) 

Justice Gookin: (Much frightened) G-good g-g- 
gracious! (With a forced smile) 
Come right in, Lord Feathertop! 
Come right in ! (exeunt.) 

Scene 2. 

The curtain opens on the stage set with a rocking 

chair and settee, and the gorgeous gilt-framed mirror 

in the center backed with blue cloth. 



EDUCATIONAL DRAMATIZATION 327 

Polly: Methinks he must be some great 

nobleman come to see my father! 

Jane: More like you think he comes to 

woo you. But never fear. No man 
would ever woo you. 

Polly: No more would man woo you, you 

shrew ! Oh, he enters ! Are my curls 
aright ? Are my ribbons neat ? 

Jane : Nay ! Nay ! 

Polly: (More excited) Does my dress hang 

aright? There! Now am I more 
suited to meet him? 

Jane: You will never be suited to meet a 

noble lord. (She flounces out, but 
peers through the side curtain. 
Polly turns away from the door and 
hums, " Drink to me only with 
thine eyes.") 

Justice Gookin : Polly ! Daughter Polly ! Come 
hither, child. (She rises gracefully 
and goes nearer to them.) This 
gentleman is Lord Feathertop, who 
hath brought me a token of re- 
membrance from an ancient friend 
of mine. Pay your duty to his lord- 
ship, child, and honor him as his 
quality deserves. (He smiles; then 
as Feathertop turns to Polly, he 
frowns and stamps his gouty foot. 
This has an unpleasant effect, for he 
makes awful faces and has to sup- 
press a yell of pain. Then he limps 
out of the room. Feathertop bows 
to Polly.) 

Feathertop: It is the most desirable pleasure to 
meet you, fair Mistress Polly, and 
if you will sit right here and talk to 



328 



READING AND LITERATURE 



me, I could not wish for anything 
more enjoyable. 

Polly: (Curtseys) You honor me, Lord 

Feathertop. (He gives her a brass 
bracelet.) Oh, sir! (Then both sit 
on the settee. Jane pinches Polly 
from behind curtain.) 

Feathertop: (Very broad A's throughout) I 
suppose, Mistress Polly, that you do 
not know very much about me, but 
in the country where I live I do not 
know one maiden half so fair as you. 

Polly: (Blushing) Oh, really, Lord Feather- 

top, you flatter me. And as for you, 
your magnificence and handsome- 
ness quite dazzles me. You are the 
most wonderful gentleman I have 
ever met. 

Feathertop : Ah ! You speak well, fair lady 
(complacently). But pray repeat the 
song that you were singing. Your 
voice is so sweet and clear that I 
would hear it again. 

Polly : Oh, no, sir, I cannot sing to-day ; but 

I will tell you the story of my song. 

Feathertop: Oh, pray do tell me, Mistress Polly. 
I should be delighted to hear it. 

Polly: There was a beautiful lady who had 

a wonderful knight for a lover, but 
after a while she found he was only 
a thief and a shabby person (Feath- 
ertop smooths his ruffles uneasily), 
and so she bade him go ! and never 
come in her sight again. But after- 
wards she found she loved him so 
that — she just pined away — and died 
(languishingly). Is not that a sad 
tale, Lord Feathertop? 



EDUCATIONAL DRAMATIZATION 329 

Feathertop : (Wriggles uncomfortably.) Ah, 
yes, it is a lovely sad tale indeed, 
Mistress Polly, and I know how 
sweetly you would sing it. You 
know, fair one, I have had talks with 
many maidens, but they all seem dull 
compared to you. Your voice, it looms 
on the night ! 

Polly: Oh no, sir, o-h, no, no; you are 

much taller than I am. Just come 
to the mirror and see! (They go, 
and part the blue curtain behind the 
mirror, revealing the scarecrow.) 
Oh, sir, how well we . . . OH ! ! 
(Screams and faints as Jane rushes 
in to catch her. Feathertop stands 
aghast, clutching his wig, in great 
anguish. Justice Gookin enters and 
points firmly toward the door. 
Feathertop puffs vigorously at his 
pipe and staggers.) 

Justice Gookin : Impostor ! GO ! 
Curtain. 

ACT III 

Scene 1. 

(Same as Act 1, Scene 1.) 
Mother Rigby : (Sitting by the fire — stirs a kettle 
and chants.) 
Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble, 
Fire burn, and caldron bubble. 
* * * * * 

White spirits and black, 

Red spirits and grey, 
Mingle, mingle, mingle, 

Ye that mingle may. 



33Q READING AND LITERATURE 

(She hears rapid footsteps on the road outside.) 
Ha! What step is that? Whose 
skeleton is out of its grave now, I 
wonder? (A figure bursts headlong 
into the cottage door. It is Feather- 
top. In every way he is as gorgeous 
as he was just before he saw himself 
in the magic mirror.) What has gone 
wrong, my darling puppet, my pre- 
cious one? Did yonder sniffling 
hypocrite thrust thee from his 
door? I'll— 

Feathertop: No, Mother. It was not that. 

Mother Rigby : Did the girl scorn my precious? I'll 
cover her face with pimples, and 
her front teeth shall drop out. 

Feathertop : Leave her alone, Mother. The girl 

was half won But I've seen 

myself, Mother. I've seen myself 
as I really am, and I'll exist no 
longer. (So saying he takes the pipe 
from his mouth and throws it into 
the fire. At the same instant he 
sinks to the floor, a heap of tattered 
clothes, some straw, and an old, 
shriveled pumpkin, in which the 
slit (which was once the mouth) 
twists itself into a despairing grin.) 

Mother Rigby : Poor Feathertop I'd gladly 

give him another chance in the 
world. There are thousands upon 
thousands of charlatans and cocks- 
combs materially just like him who 
do not act as sensibly. But his heart 
is too tender. I'll make him just the 
plain scarecrow that he really is. It 
is an innocent and useful vocation, 



EDUCATIONAL DRAMATIZATION 331 

and 'twill suit him well. And as for 
this pipe of tobacco, I need it more 
than he. (So saying she cries in her 
high, sharp voice) Dickon, another 
coal for my pipe. 

Curtain. 

C. THE VALUES OF THESE SORTS OF DRAMATIZATION 

All children enjoy this dramatic expression. They 
find most delightful the opportunity to put into a living 
and breathing shape stories they enjoy and have somewhat 
dimly seen in imagination. They like also to design 
masque plans, for the return of spring or of the birds and 
flowers. I have a highly characteristic set of such plans. 
One seventh-grader has tried to dramatize the story of 
Persephone ; another, by a sixth-grade boy, is called " The 
Grocer of Featherville," and records the troubles of Mr. 
Flicker the grocer and the bird police force in locating 
several cans of preserved grubworms which Mr. Flicker 
had stored before his migration in the fall. He at last 
found them concealed deep in his own tree shop. Still 
other plays dramatize the rout of Winter and the Winter 
Months by the Bluebirds "hot on their trail ;" the re- 
lease of Nature from prison; and the awakening of a 
hibernating bear by the returning birds. 

Thus original plays as well as story-dramatizations 
begin early in the school course, and sometimes result in 
quite charming small masques or comedies. All this is a 
powerful reinforcement of the aids to literary under- 
standing discussed in the preceding chapter. 

The values of such readings and of the assembly 
dramatizations do not need special emphasis. Of course 
much is gained in helping poor and dim enunciation and 
getting away from dull monotony of utterance. The con- 
tinuing lack of self -consciousness, where pupils are caught 



332 READING AND LITERATURE 

early enough, is also most pleasing. The whole matter of 
oral reading becomes at once, and for good, a different, a 
real thing. 

A main fact about all these plays is that they were con- 
trived and developed almost exclusively by the pupils them- 
selves. The ninth grade which played the Odyssey voted 
down a good Ali Baba play submitted by one of two com- 
mittees into which the class had divided, because that 
play followed a current theatrical production. But each 
class made use of the criticism and the assistance of 
everyone, and of every suggestion they could impress into 
service. There is of course most real and valuable com- 
position training in the attempt to get ideas so expressed 
as to reach the audience clearly and effectively. After- 
ward, in writing the text and an account of the plays for 
preservation, they attempt to put into the words the tones 
of voice and the movements of the actors on the stage, as 
illustrated in the Feathertop play as reported above. 

Naturally the one gain that stands out as most im- 
portant in the teaching of literature is the power of re- 
alizing what is read. No one who has helped in drama- 
tizing a play like Feathertop, or Silas Marner, or Dickens' 
Christmas Carol can ever again read a similar story with- 
out increased power of seeing it happen before him. No 
one who has gone through the labor of developing a play 
of the Return of Odysseus, or who even has seen the thing 
done with appreciation, can consider classics remote or 
ineffectual. It is not merely the somewhat specially diffi- 
cult business of realizing the action of plays ; realization of 
the whole range of narrative prose and poetry is inspired 
and quickened. Far from leading pupils to depend on 
actual performances to do their visualizing for them, such 
dramatization can best stir the slow and feeble imagination 
to act, and help it to go on with its own proper work in the 



EDUCATIONAL DRAMATIZATION 333 

reading of real literature and in the understanding and 
appreciation of life and fellowmen. 

The most significant value of dramatization, how- 
ever, is above and beyond these specific results, and per- 
haps beyond the achievement of significant experience 
which we have set as the benefit of all excellent literature : 
It is a freeing from the ordinary cramping and narrowing 
inhibitions which prevent or pervert our expression of the 
best that is in us. We grow out of the happy unconscious- 
ness of the very little child into a miserably constant 
awareness, in the period of youth, of forms and modes and 
patterns and restraints. Many children become so self- 
conscious then that they often suffer grievously. It takes 
expert guidance to lead them out of this knot or tangle to 
such mastery of necessary conventions as makes uncon- 
sciousness again possible, along with real power of ex- 
pression. Dramatic work of the sort we have been con- 
sidering has, probably more than any other agency, the 
possibility of creating such interest in various modes of 
expression, and in various ideas and characteristics to ex- 
press, that self -consciousness and the restraints of ordi- 
nary, painful social expression are forgotten. Where 
dramatization can have the further aid of excellent dan- 
cing and music, there is provided an almost perfect 
medium for these purposes. So soon as children get this 
interest and take part, even a very minor part, in such 
development, they have achieved a liberation which they 
need never quite surrender. 15 

Dramatizations, too, furnish about the best situations 
for such living expression and confirmation of social ideals 
as we have already discussed. 16 Once I helped a fifth grade 

15 1 am indebted for emphasis on this point to Mrs. Emma Sheri- 
dan Fry, author of the book Educational Dramatics (Lloyd Adams 
Noble, 1917), which rightly gives much emphasis to this significant 
value of dramatization. 

16 Chapter IV, p. 119 f. 



334 READING AND LITERATURE 

who, their teacher assured me, were incapable of coopera- 
tive work, in developing a small play on "Robin Hood and 
the Sorrowful Knight." In hearing them read their rough 
drafts of scenes, I merely suggested that the pupils chosen 
as a committee for writing the final play would naturally 
be those who showed that they could make the best use 
of all manuscripts submitted, getting good points wherever 
they appeared. The pupils eagerly took notes on all such 
points, and their notes were comprehensive and very 
amusing. They showed real avidity in discovering use- 
ful suggestions. Such experiences as this may be aided to 
grow into intelligent cooperation on more serious and ma- 
ture problems in high school and after. They make ad- 
vancement possible. Good constructive criticism without 
personality and intrusiveness, ability to take criticism well, 
hearty sharing in working and reworking are essential to 
well ordered society, and we have done little toward de- 
veloping them in schools. Indeed, immense advances might 
be made in education or in democratic society if we should 
all adopt such an attitude and spirit in our adult commit- 
tees and discussions. 17 

1T S. A. Leonard : The Social Recitation — Chicago Schools Journal, 
v. i, No. 10, p. 2 (June, 1919) ; also in Proceedings of the National 
Association of Secondary School Principals, v. ii. See Miss Skinner's 
article, already referred to (footnote, p. 290), and the bibliography, 
Appendix I below, pp. 344, ff. 360, ff. 



CHAPTER XI 

SUMMARY 

It remains to sum up this discussion of the teaching of 
reading and literature, in a statement of essential aims and 
principles. These are presented, not of course as proved 
and final, but for consideration and further experimental 
testing in classrooms. 

1. The aim of teaching literature is the utmost 
possible broadening and enrichment of young people's 
experience, and. their better appreciation or valuing 
of all experience, rather than of books alone; this 
requires (a) that there be realization of what is 
presented, and not mere dealing with words ; (b) that 
the literature chosen to be true to human experience 
and human beliefs; and (c) that it be also significant 
and worth while for the individual child. 

2. The teacher of literature must have first of all 
a thorough literary equipment, including: (a) first- 
hand experience that is genuine and varied and deep, 
and (b) much broadening and enhancement of life 
through reading and truly apprehending the best 
literature. These essentials of equipment alone make 
possible the application of valid standards of selection. 

3. The actual process of teaching literature in 
grades and high schools rests upon three funda- 
mental principles of education: (a) that we must 
begin where children actually are, in experience and 
interest, knowledge, and ability; (b) that we must 
select only subject matter and essentials of technique 
or skill that are thoroughly and altogether worth 
while, not merely to adult society, but to our indi- 

335 



336 READING AND LITERATURE 

vidual pupils here and now; and (c) that we shall 
gain almost immeasurably in motive force if we can 
replace compulsions and allurements to work by 
children's realization of the immediate worth to 
them of specific knowledge or skill, and by their 
curious zest to explore new experiences, in books 
as in life. 

4. The teacher must begin by studying real chil- 
dren as individuals, and discovering what experiences 
they have had and what they personally and genuinely 
enjoy in books. 

5. He is then better able to form judgments of 
the wholesomeness and fitness of a book for his pupils' 
actual needs and interests, and for directing them to 
true and socially desirable experiences and ideas. 

6. We must separate clearly, in considering and 
in carrying out the teaching process, the study of 
reading from the living experience of literature: 
The technique of comprehension — i.e., silent read- 
ing, or study — consists of getting meaning from 
words and sentences by questioning and supplement- 
ing as one proceeds ; it is mastered by force of clearly 
conscious and resolute purpose. The realization of 
experience presented in literature — "the literature 
of power " — is rather a pursuit of engaging aspects 
of life, and is not, in general, consciously purposive. 

7. For teaching the technique of reading or study 
we must (a) find out precisely our individual pupils' 
powers of understanding, and then (b) increase these 
powers through developing, by means of such genu- 
ine purposes as promote study of books in real 
situations, the essentials of skill in getting thought 
from print. 

8. For developing realization of literature, we 
need (a) to give children wide freedom of choice 



SUMMARY 337 

- among much excellent literature adapted to their 
personal understanding and interest, and (b) to help 
them apprehend what is somewhat more difficult 
than they can achieve for themselves. This should 
be done without attention to data of knowledge for 
its own sake, or to anything else aside from the main 
business of literature: realizing or sensing concrete 
sense-details and grasping the fundamental and uni- 
fying idea of a piece of literature. 

9. For accomplishing such realization and in- 
terpretation of literature, we find need of such ap- 
proaches as excellent reading aloud, with natural and 
social comment or discussion, and of such back- 
grounds as are furnished by a real and vivid sense of 
the period and the human influences which produced 
a great book. 

10. Of further value are, especially, a pupil's 
attempts (a) to express simply and concretely what he 
considers the main idea of a piece of literature, and 
what he likes or dislikes about it : (b) to embody in 
any sort of creative form his own experiences and 
ideas; and (c) to give the best possible dramatic or 
other expression to his sense of the images and ideas 
in a narrative. 

The substance of the entire study is that enrichment of 
life comes about through genuine and intelligent at- 
tempts to reconstruct one's own equipment of experience 
into the perceptions and ideas suggested in excellent books. 



22 



APPENDIX I 



BIBLIOGRAPHIES ON LITERATURE AND THE TEACHING 
OF LITERATURE * 

The following journals referred to in these bibliographies are 
of especial value to the teacher of literature : 

The English Journal (abbreviated E. J.), 506 West 69th St., 
Chicago, Illinois. 

The Elementary School Journal (abbreviated El. Sch. Jr.), 
University of Chicago Press. 

The School Review (abbreviated Sch. Rev.), University of 
Chicago Press. 

Teachers College Record (T. C. Record), Columbia University. 

The Bulletin of the Illinois Association of Teachers of English 
(abbreviated III. Bulletin), University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois. 

The Leaflet of the New England Association of Teachers of 
English (abbreviated N. E. Leaflet), Milton Academy, Milton Center, 
Massachusetts. 

In addition, Drama, Poet Lore, the Atlantic Monthly, the 
Educational Review, Education, School and Society, the Journal of 
Educational Research, and publications of the Bureau of Education, 
the National Education Association, and numerous state and sectional 
groups of teachers of English contain material of value. The Monthly 
Record of Current Educational Publications, issued by the Bureau of 
Education, Washington, D. C, contains most titles of articles and books 
in this field. It is sent free to teachers. 
CHAPTER I 

LITERATURE AND LIFE 

Matthew Arnold Literature and Science, in Dis- 

courses in America, Macmillan 
Introduction to Ward's English 
Poets, Macmillan 

Arnold Bennett Literary Taste and How to Form 

It, Doran, 1910 

Hiram Corson The Aims of Literary Study (Also 

in Poet Lore 6 1377, 473, and 536), 
Macmillan 

* Samuel McChord Crothers The Mission of Humor, The Gentle 

Reader, The Enjoyment of 
Poetry, in The Gentle Reader, 
Houghton 



*The titles which have proved most useful in teachers' classes are marked 
with asterisks. 



339 



34 o READING AND LITERATURE 

*John Dewey Democracy and Education, Mac- 

millan, 1916, pp. 278 ff. et passim 
Reconstruction in Philosophy, Holt, 
1920 
Chapter 1 contains a luminous treatment of the function of 
literature in life. 

* Max Eastman The Enjoyment of Poetry, 

Scribner, 1913 
A very satisfactory account of the poetic instinct outside 
as well as inside books, and especially of the poetry in children. 
*J. B. Kerfoot How to Read, Houghton, 1916 

* John Galsworthy Some Platitudes About the Theater 

A Novelist's Allegory. Both 
in The Inn of Tranquillity, 
Scribner, 1912 
Francis B. Gummere Handbook of Poetics, Ginn 

* E. A. Greening- Lamborn The Rudiments of Criticism, 

Oxford, 1919 
" A simple and illuminating treatment of appreciation of poetry." 
Brander Matthews A Study of Versification, 

The Study of the Drama, Houghton 
J. E. B. Mayor Handbook of Modern English 

Meter, Cambridge Press 
Richard G. Moulton A Literary Study of the Bible, 

Heath 
* The Modern Reader's Bible, 
Macmillan 
William Allen Neilson Essentials of Poetry, Houghton 

*C. A. Smith What Can Literature Do for Met 

Doubleday 
A very good discussion for the general reader. 
E. L. Thorndike " The Aesthetic Emotion," Teachers 

College Record (II: 195-200), 
1901 
George E. Woodberry The Appreciation of Literature, 

Chapters I and VII, Harcourt 
A New Defence of Poetry, in 
Heart of Man, Harcourt 
C. T. Winchester Some Principles of Literary Criti- 

cism, Macmillan, 1905 

THE COURSE IN LITERATURE 

W. M. Aikin Types in the Study of Literature, 

E. J., (6:231) April, 1917 

Arlo Bates Talks on Teaching Literature. 

Houghton, 1906 



APPENDIX 



34i 



♦Franklin T. Baker An Educational Bogey, ///. Bulle- 

tin, May 1, 1912 
" Not all children will love great literature." 

High-School Reading, Compulsory 
and Voluntary — E. J. (4:1) Jan- 
uary, 1 91 5 
♦Franklin Bobbitt The Curriculum, Houghton, 1918 

Chapter 18 : " Reading as a Leisure Occupation " is one of the 
best treatments of the subject of values and selection. 
Emma Miller Bolenius Teaching Literature in the Gram- 

mar Grades and High School, 
Houghton, 1915 
* Carpenter, Baker and Scott The Teaching of English, The 

Place of English in the Lower 
Grades, pp. 75-82; Literature in 
the Elementary Schools, 155-67; 
Literature in Secondary Educa- 
tion, 250 ff. Longmans, 1906, 1913 
Literature and Life in the School, 

Houghton, 1906 
The Teaching of English, Chapter 

I, Macmillan, 1902 
An Experiment in Third-Year 
English. In Sch. Rev. 25 1489 
Ancient History and English. In 

Sch. Rev. 25:480 
Redistribution of the Content of 
Some High School Courses, E. J. 
(3:490) 
The Teaching of Poetry, Houghton, 

1914 
The Elementary Course in English., 
Chicago Univ. Press, 1908 
Contains specially valuable bibliographies. 

Report of the Committee on Re- 
organization of English in Sec- 
ondary Schools, pp. 26-35, 45-53, 
and 63-84. Bureau of Education 
Bulletin 1917, No. 2 
E. Lodor Shall We Teach the History of 

Literature in the High School? 
E.J. (6:601) 
Louise Pound What Should be Expected of the 

English Teacher? E. J. (10:179), 
April, 1921 



J. Rose Colby 



Percival Chubb 



H. V. Church 



F. G. Hobson 



V. C. Coulter 



*A. H. R. Fairchild 



♦J. F. Hosic 



342 



READING AND LITERATURE 



Lora Atkins Henion 



Porter L. MacClintock 



* Essie Chamberlain 



Louise Pound What the History of Literature Is, 

E. J. (7:413) September, 1918 
The Teaching of the History of 
Literature, ///. Bulletin, (7:$) 
February 15, 1915 
Literature in the Elementary School, 

Chicago Univ. Press, 1907 
Report of Committee on Curricu- 
lum Reconstruction — III. Bulletin 
(12:4) January 1, 1920 
The Bulletins for February and for March, 1920, contain cur- 
ricula of Illinois high schools, to be considered in discussion of 
this report. 

Methods of Teaching in High 
Schools, Ch. 10, " Habits of 
Harmless Enjoyment." Ginn, 

1915 
On the Art of Reading, Putnam, 
1920 
On Reading the Bible " and " On the Use 



S. C. Parker 



Arthur Quiller- Couch 



Good Chapters 
of Masterpieces." 
George F. Reynolds English Literature in Secondary 

Schools, Education, (32:1) Sep- 
tember, 191 1 _~ 
Minimum Essentials in Literature, 
III. Bulletin, (12:8) May, 1920 
Following a previous valuable article on minimums in composition. 
Sarah E. Simons English Problems in the Solving, 

Scott, Foresman, 1920. See 
Chapter I, pp. 15-26 
Literature and the Pedagogue, Poet 

Lore, (21 311) 
A Letter to a High School Teacher 
of English, New England Leaflet, 
November, 1904 
Education of Youth between 
Twelve and Fourteen, Journal of 
Educational Administration and 
Supervision, April, 19 16 
The Teaching of English in (he 
Secondary Schools, Chapters I 
and VII , Houghton , 1 9 1 7 
Further bibliography in III Bulletin (8:5), February 15, 1916, p. 4- 



Lewis Worthington Smith 



David Snedden 



C. S. Thomas 



APPENDIX 



343 



CHAPTER II 
THE EQUIPMENT OF TEACHERS OF LITERATURE 



* Franklin T. Baker, Chairman 

T. M. Balliet 

Alma Blount 

Carpenter, Baker and Scott 

* Carnegie Foundation 

Franklin B. Dyer 
Allison Gaw 

Samuel Foss Holmes 

* James F. Hosic, Editor 
William F. Linehan 



New England Association of 
Teachers of English 

H. G. Paul. Chairman 



Report of the Committee on 
Preparation of Teachers of Eng- 
lish, National Council of Teachers 
of English, E. J. (4:323). 
May, 1915 

The Teacher of English, E.J. (2 :33s) 

Influence of Present Methods of 
Graduate Instruction on the 
Teaching in Secondary Schools, 
Sch. Rev., April, 1908 

Normal School Training for Teach- 
ing of English in Elementary 
Schools, E. J. (2:215) 

The Teaching of English, pp. 32-4 
and 305-18, Longmans 

Professional Preparation of Teach- 
ers for American Public Schools, 
Bulletin, No. 14, 1920 

Questions for Teachers' Self -Exami- 
nation, E. J. (5:440), June, 1916 

Collegiate Training of the Teach- 
er of High School English, E. J. 
(5:320), May, 1916 

College Equipment for the English 
Teacher in Subjects other than 
English. New England Asso- 
ciation of Teachers of English, 
Leaflet (14: No. 119), June, 1914 

Reorganization of English 

in Secondary Schools, Report of 
Joint Committee. Bureau of 
Education, Bulletin 1917, No. 2, 
pp. 147-50 

Courses in Education as a Prep- 
aration for English Teaching, 
N. E. Leaflet (14 : No. 120), 
October, 1914 

The Training of English Teachers: 
Report of the Committee, 
Education (14:473), April, 1914 

Report of a Committee on the 
Preparation of Teachers of 
English. ///. Bulletin, (7:5), 
February 15, 1915 



344 READING AND LITERATURE 

James E. Russell Professional Factors in the Training 

of the High School Teacher, 

Educational Review, March, 1913 

Charles Swain Thomas The Training of the English Teacher. 

Chapter 15 of The Teaching of 
English in Secondary Schools, 
Houghton, 191 7 
Chauncey W. Wells, Chairman Report of the Committee on 

the Training of English Teachers, 
California Assn. of English 
Teachers, May, 1916 
A. Duncan Yocum The Compelling of Efficiency 

throughTeacherTraining. School 
and Society (1-469), April, 1915 
Bureau of Education, The National Crisis in Education, 

Washington, D. C. Bulletin No. 29, 1920 

Papers by W. C. Bagley, David Felmley, and others on the short- 
age of teachers and on the preparation and lack of preparation of 
teachers actually in service. 
*Guy M.Whipple, H. L. Miller, The Professional Preparation of 
and Others High School Teachers. Eight- 

eenth Yearbook of the National 
Society for the Study of Education, 
Part I, 1919 
In pages 7-165 Professor Miller describes the University of Wisconsin 
Plan for "Directed Teaching: A Plan of Preparation through 
Participation;" pp. 355 ff. contain a bibliography. 

CHAPTER III 

BASIC PRINCIPLES OF TEACHING 

*John Dewey School and Society, Chicago Univ. 

Press, 19 1 5 
Toward the reconstruction of education with children rather than 
subject matter as the "center of gravity." 

How We Think, Heath, 19 10 
Clear presentation and illustration of the way our minds work in 
attacking a problem — not logically, as in a completed theorem 
in geometry, but experimentally; of great value in helping children 
to think intelligently. 

Democracy and Education, 
Macmillan, 19 16 
A thorough and invaluable summary of the best thought upon 
education, especially in breaking down the oppositions commonly 
accepted between interest and discipline, the practical and the 
cultural, and the like. See especially the paragraphs on "develop- 
ment of subject matter in the learner," pp. 216-26. 



APPENDIX 345 

E. C. Campagnac Lectures on the Teaching of Compo- 

sition, Houghton, 19 1 2 
Especially good are pages 36 ft". 
Ralph Waldo Emerson Education and Culture in Educa- 

tion {Riverside Educational Mono- 
graphs) 
Important and very "contemporary" statements of the relation 
of children and schools. 
C. H. Judd The Psychology of High School 

Subjects, Ginn, 1915 
*W. H. Kilpatrick The Project Method, T. C. 

Record, September, 19 18 
"Wholehearted purposing" by the learner the surest route to 
educational mastery and its desirable concomitants. Dr. Kilpatrick 
discusses the subject further in a series of articles appearing in the 
Journal of Educational Method, Univ. of Chicago Press, Vol. I, 
September, 192 1. A valuable symposium on the Project 
Method by Dr. Kilpatrick, Dr. Bagley and others, appears in 
T. C. Record ( 22: 4 ) September, 1921. 
William James Talks to Teachers, Holt, 1899 

H. D. Kitson How to Use your Mind, Lippincott 

Charles Lamb The Old and the New Schoolmaster 

in Essays of Elia 
Dr. Crothers suggests making an appreciation of this prerequisite 
to issuing a license to any teacher. Read "The Mission of 
Humor" in Dr. Crothers' The Gentle Reader. 
Gerald Stanley Lee The Child and His Book, Putnam, 

1907 
Pleasantly discursive essays, full of suggestions — especially on 
the " top-of-the-bureau principle. " 
Sterling A. Leonard English Composition as a Social 

Problem, Houghton, 19 17 
English teaching as based in social demand and supplied with 
motive force by consciousness of social values. 
Frank McMurry How to Study and Teaching Pupils 

to Study, Houghton, 1909 
A highly valuable analysis of this problem, intimately connected 
with that of silent reading. 
*Henry C. Morrison Studies in High School Procedure: 

Mastery, Sch. Rev. (29:182) 
March, 192 1 
Urges definitely laying out principles to be understood and powers 
to be gained, not seventy per cent, but one hundred per cent. ; 
exempting the excellent for optional work; testing for only one 
point at a time; teaching again where necessary; demoting the 
"confirmed seventy per center;" less covered, but more mastered, 
by each pupil. 



346 READING AND LITERATURE 

H. L. Miller Supervised Study, Bulletin of the 

University of Wisconsin, Serial 
No. 894, General Series 684 
A stimulating discussion of the ends in view. 
George Herbert Palmer and The Teacher, Essays and Addresses 
Alice Freeman Palmer on Education 

The Glory of the Imperfect 
The Ideal Teacher, Houghton, 1908 
S. C. Parker Methods of Teaching in High Schools, 

Ginn, 19 15 

Angelo Patri A Schoolmaster of the Great City, 

Macmillan, 191 7 
A school principal's social work in a great New York 
elementary school. 
Dallas Lore Sharp Education for Individuality, Edu- 

cation for Authority, Atlantic, 
June, 1920, and July, 192 1 
Tasks of primary significance, in part beyond the possibility of 
the schools, but in part their central responsibility; essays of great 
value to all teachers. 
Romiett Stevens Stenographic Reports of High 

School Lessons, Columbia Univer- 
sity Publications, 1912 
Valuable stenographic reports of lessons, for criticism of high 
school procedure, with a formulation of critical principles. 
*Edward L. Thorndike Educational Psychology, 3 Vols. 

Teachers College, New York, 

I9I3-4 
Summary and essential interpretation of psychological studies and 
thought as applied to education. 

Educational Psychology, Briefer 
Course, Teachers College, New 
York, 1 9 14 
One-volume condensation of the fundamental matters above. 

Education for Individuality and 
Initiative. Teachers College 
Record, 17:405 
Principles of Teaching Based on 
Psychology, Seiler, New York, 1906 
A practical formulation of essentials. 
John B. Watson Psychology from the Standpoint of a 

Behaviorist, revised edition, 
Lippincott 
Peter J. Zimmers Teaching Boys and Girls How to 

Study, Parker Press, Madison, 1917 
Very concrete application in an actual school system of 
Dr. McMurry 's ideas, noted above ; the success achieved was evident 
and excellent. 



APPENDIX 347 

TOWARD UNDERSTANDING CHILDREN 
Elementary School Age 

R. L. Stevenson Penny Plain and Twopence Colored, 

in Memories and Portraits, Scribner, 

1893 
Richard Pryce Christopher, Houghton, 191 1 

Part I tells entertainingly of a little boy's development. 
James Barrie Sentimental Tommie, Scribner 

An unusual boy of tremendous imagination, probably J. B. himself. 
Hugh Walpole Jeremy, Doran, 19 19 

Josephine D. Bacon The Madness of Philip, and Other 

Stories, Doubleday, 1902 
Myra Kelly Little Aliens, Scribner, 19 10 

Little Citizens, Doubleday 
In a school on the lower East Side in New York City. 
George Madden Martin Emmy Lou, Her Book and Heart, 

Doubleday, 1902 
A very human little girl. 
Dorothy Canfield (Fisher) Understood Betsy, Holt, 19 17 

A little girl whose environments first stifle her and then urge her to 
find self-reliance; a most valuable educational study. 
Kenneth Grahame Dream Days 

The Golden Age, Lane, 1904 
William Allen White The Court of Boyville, Macmillan 

Books that should be illustrated by Briggs ' pictures of Skinnay and 
the rest. 
Stephen Crane Whilomeville Stories, Harper, 1900 

11 Once-upon-a-Time-Ville " ; especially good is "Showin' Off"-- 
Peter Newell Illustrations. 
Lucy Maud Montgomery Anne of Green Gables, Page, 1908 

Laura E. Richards When I was Your Age, Estes 

Child life in the home of Julia Ward Howe; the story of the 
children's dramatic ambitions is amusingly told. 
Kate Douglas WiggiN Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, 

Houghton; Grossett 
An imaginative child and her early adventures. 
Charles Kingsley Letters and Memoirs — abridged edi- 

tion — Macmillan 
His home life, pp. 257 ff. and letters to children, pp. 25 and 107. 
High School Age 
Henry Cuyler Bunner The Tenor, in Short Sixes, Puck, 189 1 

Young girls' romantic absurdity, self-cured. 
Mark Twain Tom Sawyer 

Huckleberry Finn — school edition, 
Harper 
The rescue of the runaway slave is a wonderful study of 
boys' imagination. 



348 READING AND LITERATURE 

Owen Tohnson The Varmint 

The Tennessee Shad, Baker, 1910-n 
E. W. Hornung Fathers of Men, Scribner 

Eden Phillpotts The Human Boy and the War, 

Harper 
Accounts supposedly by the "human boys" themselves of life at 
an English boarding school. 

From the Angle of Seventeen, Little, 
Brown, 1914 
Remarkably reproduces the solemn earnestness of the boy's diary 
of commonplace events and ridiculous achievements. 
Booth Tarkington Penrod, Doubleday, 1915 

Tom Sawyer in a different environment. 

Seventeen, Harper, 19 16 
The excellence of many parts of this account of Willie Baxter's 
gosling romance is lessened by its stringing out and stupidity at the 
end. The Intimate Strangers, the American "flapper" — com- 
panion piece to Seventeen. 
W. H. Hudson Far Away and Long Ago, Dutton, 

1918 
Boy life on the Pampas. 
James Barrie Alice Sit-hy -the- Fire, Scribner, 19 19 

Young girls arrived at the age of romantic absurdity, and a mother 
of amazing wit and sense. 
George Eliot The Mill on the Floss, Everyman's; 

Dutton. 
Brother and Sister Sonnets, in her Poems, Little, Brown; Estes. 
Louise Alcott Little Women, Little, Brown 

Children's Own Writing 

OpalWhitely The Story of Opal, Atlantic Press, 

1920 
Daisy Ashford The Young Visiters, Doran, 1920 

Books for Study 

To throw light on real experience and the observation of children, in 

literature and outside it— not to take the place of these. 
*E. L. Thorndike Educational Psychology, Vol. I, 

on Instincts; or Briefer Course, 

Chapters 1-6, Teachers College, 

1913-1914 
Norsworthy and Whitely Psychology of Childhood. Especially 

Chapters 1-6, Macmillan, 19 19 
J. B. Watson Psychology, Lippincott, 19 19 



APPENDIX 349 

C. H. Cooley Human Nature and the Social Order, 

Chapter III et passim, Scribner, 

1902 
Hazel B. Clark From the Green Primer to the 

Brown, E. J. (5:99), February, 

1916 
Phillip Davis Street Land, Small, Maynard, 19 15 

Annie Windsor Allen Boys and Girls, Atlantic Monthly, 

June, 1920 
G. Stanley Hall Adolescence, Appleton, 1904 

To be tasted, not devoured, or too explicitly credited. 
Jane Addams The Spirit of Youth and the City 

Streets, Macmillan, 19 12 
J. Adams Puffer The Boy and His Gang, Houghton, 

1912 
Earl Barnes Studies in Education, 1:15 and 203 

Child Study Monthly II: 152, 167, 

et passim 
Floyd Dell Were You Ever a Child? Huebsch , 

1919 
A witty but fundamentally earnest and sound consideration. 

CHAPTERS III AND IV 

CHILDREN'S SELECTIONS OF BOOKS: ACTUAL 
CONDITIONS AND POSSIBLE REMEDIES 

* Allan Abbott Entrance English from the Boy's 

Point of View. Education 22:78 
Contemporary Literature in the 
High School. Bulletin of the 
Illinois Association of Teachers of 
English, April 15, 19 15. (Vol. 
VII, No. 7) 
A High School Course in Periodical 
Literature, E. J. (2:422) Sep- 
tember, 19 1 3 
Reading Tastes of High School 
Pupils, Sch. Rev. 10:585 
A valuable experiment, with illustration of pupils' choices and 
comments. 

*Franklin T. Baker High School Reading, Compulsory 

and Voluntary, E. J. (4:1), Janu- 
ary, 19 1 5. (See the introductory 
note to the reading lists, Appen- 
dix II, below) 



35° 



READING AND LITERATURE 



Herbert Bates, Chairman 



Walter Barnes 



Carpenter, Baker and Scott 



Percival Chubb 



Elizabeth C. Cook 



Report of the Committee on 
Home Reading, E.J. (3:44-50), 
January, 19 14 
Types of Children 's Literature, 

World Book Co., 19 19 
The Teaching of English, pp. 91-8; 

i55- 2 5o, Longmans, 1906 
The Teaching of English. Chapters 
VI (76 ff.) and IX (117 ff.), 
Macmillan, 1902 
An Experiment in the Teaching of 
College English. Teachers College 
Record, 1918 (19:131) 
Results of giving freedom of choice as opposed to prescribed reading 
lists; as suggestive for high school as for college English. 
Essie Chamberlain Outside Reading Interests of Boys 

and Girls. III. Bulletin, January, 
1922. See also "Some Lists of 
Children's Reading, " below 
Interest Factors in Primary Reading 
Material. Teachers College Contri- 
butions to Educational Theory, No. 
113, Columbia Univ., 1921 
Outside Reading, E. J. (6:20), 

January, 19 17 
Fingerposts to Children's Reading, 

McClurg 
Outside Reading: The Case for the 
Defense. ///. Bulletin (11: No 7), 
April 1, 19 19 
Does not approve including books in other subjects than English 
Literature. 
Clara N. Hawkes High School Classics, Surveyed and 

Suggested. Illinois Bulletin, Feb- 
ruary 1, 1922 
H. C. Henderson Report on Children's Reading, 

Report of State Superintendent 
of Public Instruction, New York 
State, 1897 (II: 978 ff.) 
Max J. Herzberg Supplementary Reading for High 

School, E. J. (4:373) 
James F. Hosic The Elementary Course in English, 

Chicago Univ. Press 
Contains full and useful lists of books by grades. 

Reorganization of English in Sec- 
ondary Schools, Bureau of Edu- 
cation, 1917, No. 2, pp. 99-105 



Fanny W. Dunn 



J. Q. Engleman 



W. T. Field 



Clara N. Hawkes 



APPENDIX 351 

A. M. Jordan A Study of Children's Interests in 

Reading. Teachers College Con- 
tributions to Educational Theory, 
No. 107. Columbia University, 
192 1 
An important study of children's voluntary choices in reading, as 
revealed by records and observations in public libraries, by their 
own lists, and the like. 

Rea McCain The Fear of the Present, E. J. 

(5:605), November, 19 16 

C M. McConn High School Students ' Ranking of 

English Classics. E. J. (1:257), 
May, 1912 

Dudley Miles Socializing Outside Reading, E. J. 

(6:330), May, 19 1 7 

Maurice Moe Magazine Poetry, E. J. (4:523), 

October, 19 15 

Francis Olcott The Children's Reading, Houghton, 

1912 
List of references on children's interests, pp. 26 ff. 

H. G. Paul On Handling Supplementary Read- 

ing, E. J. (3:212 and 427), April 
and October, 19 14 

Raymond W. Pence Chats with Students about Books, 

E. J. (6:677), December, 19 17 

Minnie E. Porter Reading and Literature. Chapter 

XX of Survey of the Public Schools 
of Leavenworth, Kansas, State 
Normal School, Emporia, Kansas 

1915 

A schoolroom study of children's reading choices and of the worth 
of these choices. 
S. C. Parker Exercises for Methods of Teaching in 

High Schools, Ginn, 19 18 
A study of children's voluntary reading, p. 138 fL 
Agnes Repplier What Children Read, in Books and 

Men, Houghton 
The usual argument from the reading of young people of genius, 
including the author, as to what all children ought to be reading. 
Ida Simonson Literature for Children : A Course 

for Normal School Students. 
E. J. (2:305), May, 1913 
C. S. Thomas Teaching of English in Secondary 

Schools, Chapter XII: "The 
Problem of Outside Reading," 
Houghton, 19 1 7 



352 



READING AND LITERATURE 



Outside Reading, Sch. Rev. (21:187 
and 478) 

Critical Study of the Literature of 
Child Life, Teachers College Rec- 
ord (2:5 fL), May, 1901 

Voluntary Reading in the Classical 
High School, Sch. Rev. (13:168), 
February, 1905 

Scientific Determination of the Con- 
tent of the Elementary School 
Course in Reading. University 
of Wisconsin Studies in the Social 
Sciences and History, 1921 
A thorough and valuable study. 



Grace Thompson 



E. L. Thorndike 



Samuel Thurber, Jr. 



W. L. Uhl 



J. A. Wallace 



Gleeson White 



Margaret Wilson 



Contains a book-list. 
Clark Wissler 



A Plan for Outside Reading, Sch. 
Rev. (21:478) 

Children's Books and their Illustra- 
tors, International Studio, Lane, 
1907 

Some Suggestions about Outside 
Reading, III. Bulletin, February 
15, 1914 

Interests of Children in the Reading 
Work of the Elementary Schools, 
Pedagogical Seminary (5:523 ff.) 



CHAPTER V 

TESTS AND DIAGNOSTIC MEASUREMENTS OF 
READING ABILITY 

H. A. Brown Measurement of Ability to Read. 

Bulletin 1, New Hampshire De- 
partment Public Instruction, 19 16 
Tests of comprehension through ability to reproduce what is read; 
valuable graphs. 
May Ayers Burgess The Measurement of Silent Reading, 

Russell Sage Foundation, New 
York City 
S. A, Courtis Measurement of Classroom Prod- 

ucts, Gary School Survey, Chap- 
ter VII, pp. 263-4. Rockefeller 
Foundation, 19 18 
The best account of the value and interpretation of test standards 
in rates of reading. 



APPENDIX 353 

W F. Dearborn The Psychology of Reading, 

Columbia University Contributions 
to Philosophy and Psychology, 
No. 14, 1906 
C. T. Gray Types of Elementary School Read- 

ing Ability, Supplementary Edu- 
cational Monographs, No. I, 
Chicago University 
W. S. Gray Studies of Elementary School 

Reading as Exhibited through 
Standardized Tests, Supplemen- 
tary Educational Monographs, 
No. 1, Chicago Univ., 1917 
Thorough and painstaking testing of individuals in both oral 
and silent reading, using memory as a factor in comprehension. 

Relation of Silent Reading to 
Economy of Time in Education, 
XVI Yearbook, National Society 
for Study of Education (19 16), 
pp. 24 ff. 
Suggests getting rate in lower grades where habit is fixed; empha- 
sizes necessity of real motive; urges differentiating types of 
reading and training each sort. 

Methods of Testing Reading, El. 
Sch. Jr., January and February, 
1916 (16:231 and 281) 
E. B. Huey Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading, 

Chapter 19, New York, 1908 
Reading as a discipline and as training in the effective use of books. 
C. H. Judd and Others Reading: Its Nature and Develop- 

ment, Supplementary Educational 
Monographs, 11, No. 4, Chicago 
Univ., 1918 
Contains useful diagrams of eye-movement in reading. 
W. S. Monroe and Others Measuring the Results of Teaching, 

Chapter 111, Houghton, 1918 
E. L. Thorndike Measurement of Ability to Read, 

Teachers College Record (15:207), 
September, 19 14 
Improved Scale for Measuring 
Ability to Read, Ibid., (16:445 
and 17:40) November, 1915, and 
January, 19 16 
23 



354 READING AND LITERATURE 

E. L. Thorndike Measurement of Achievement in 

Reading: Word Knowledge, Ibid., 
17:30 

Teachers Word Book, Teachers Col- 
lege, Columbia University, 192 1 

READING TESTS 
The following tests are probably the most useful for measuring speed and 

understanding in the teaching of reading: 
E. L. Thorndike and Reading Scale (Thorndike "Alpha-2" 

W. A. McCall test extended), Teachers College 

Publication Bureau, Teachers 
College, New York City 
Ten parallel forms of this test are available, with directions for 
deriving standard "T-scores, " the pupil's reading age, and his 
reading quotient. For grades and high school. Each form is sold at 
$2.25 a hundred; sample form and directions, 10c. 
Walter S. Monroe Standardized Silent Reading Test 

(The Kansas Test, revised), 

Department of Education, the 

Univ. of Illinois 

Comprehension is measured by means of directions which the pupil 

is to follow, problems to be solved, etc. For the grades, three parallel 

forms, 80c. a hundred; for high school, 2 forms, $1.00 a hundred. 

S. A. Courtis Courtis Standard Research Tests, 

Silent Reading Test No. 2 
(The Kitten Series ) 
Paper and instructions for one test for forty children may be 
bought at $1.00, and additional tests at $24.00 per thousand; a 
25% discount is given to those who return their results for tab- 
ulation with the results of other cities. For the grades through the 
sixth. Address: 246 Eliot St., Detroit, Michigan. 
W. S. 'Gray Standard Silent Reading Test 

Standard Oral Reading Test 
Measures of speed and comprehension requiring individual measure- 
ment, but giving very definite and usable results. The test of 
comprehension is a reproduction of what is read, and involves 
memory. Oral reading test, $1.00 per hundred; sample set 6c. 
Silent reading tests, three selections — for grades 2 and 3, 4-6, and 
7-8: 2c. each title; reproduction sheets, 80c. per hundred; sample set 
15c. Department of Education, Univ. of Chicago, or Public School 
Pub. Co., Bloomington, 111. 
May Ayers Burgess Paragraphs of equal difficulty in 

which comprehension is measured 
by ability to follow directions for 
filling in lines in drawings. For 
elementary grades. Russell Sage 
Foundation, New York City 



APPENDIX 



355 



W. S. Monroe 



Bibliography of Standard Tests for 
the High School. Public School 
Pub. Company, 1920 (50c.) 



CHAPTER VI 
THE TEACHING OF INTELLIGENT READING 

Anderson and Merton Remedial Work in Reading, El. 

Sch. Jr., May and June, 1920 
The valuable practical work at Stoughton, Wisconsin. 
H. A. Brown Formulation of Method in Reading, 

Journal of Educational Research 
(11:436), June, 1920 
Reading in the Public Schools, Row, 

1911 
Psychology of the Common Branches, 

Chapter 4, Houghton, 19 16 
Report of a Committee on Method 
of Reading Books Quickly and 
Effectively, New York City Assn. 
of Teachers of English, Bulletin 
XVI, May, 1915 
Principles of Method of Teaching, 
Eighteenth Yearbook, Nat'l Soc. 
for the Study of Education, Part 
11, pp. 26 ff. Bibliography, pp. 
50-51 
Report of the Committee on Silent 
Reading, Twentieth Yearbook of 
the Nat'l Society for the Study of 
Education, Part 11, 192 1. Articles 
by W. S. Gray, J. A. O'Brien, 
May Ayers Burgess, W. W. 
Theissen, and others, and 
reports on actual experiments. 
Selection of Silent-Reading Text- 
books, Journal of Educational 
Research (11:615), October, 1920 
Necessity of selecting non-literary material and of providing for 
testing comprehension. 

James F. Hosic The Elementary Course in English, 

pp. 27-42, Chicago Univ. Press, 
1908 

Frances Jenkins Reading in the Primary Grades, 

Houghton, 19 1 5 



T. H. Briggs and L. D. 

COFFMAN 

F. N. Freeman 

Charles R. Gaston, Chairman 



W. S. Gray 



Ernest Horn, Chairman 



356 READING AND LITERATURE 

•J. B. Kerfoot How to Read, Houghton, 1916 

A clever application of modern psychology to everyday purposes in 
reading well. 
Paul Klapper Teaching Children to Read, Appleton, 

1916 
Chiefly a discussion of primary reading, conditions and methods; 
useful summary. 
Rollo L. Lyman Cooperative Investigation in Ninth- 

Grade English, Sch. Rev., 27:325 
Department of English, Differentiating Instruction in Ninth- 

University High School, Grade English, Ibid. (27772), 

Chicago December, 19 19 

Diagnosis and classification of students by means of standard 
tests; little gain observed through routine drills; the basis of the 
study next reported. 
*R. L. Lyman The Teaching of Assimilative Read- 

ing in the Junior High School, 
Ibid. (28:600), October, 1920 
The best available statement of objectives and procedures. 
Edith Shepherd Some Silent Reading Lessons in 

Junior High School English. 

Sch. Rev. (29:206), March, 192 1 

Annie E. Moore The Use of Children's Initiative in 

Beginning Reading, Teachers Col- 
lege Record, September, 1916 
J. A. O'Brien Silent Reading, Macmillan, 1920 

A study of speed in silent reading, showing great gains without loss 
in comprehension from well-devised drill. Also summarized in 
Twentieth Yearbook, National Society for Study of Education. 
W. W. Theisen Reading: Some Standard Test Re- 

sults and Teaching Observations. 
Studies in Educational Measure- 
ments No. 2, Wisconsin State 
Department of Education 
Provision for Individual Differences 
in Teaching Reading, Journal of 
Educational Research, Sept., 1920 
*E. L. Thorndike The Understanding of Sentences, 

El. Sch. Jr. (18: 1 14), October, 19 17 

Reading as Reasoning, Journal of 

Educational Psychology (8:323), 

June, 19 1 7 

One of the most valuable single papers on the specific difficulties in 

the teaching of reading. 

*W. L. Uhl Use of Results of Reading Tests as 

Bases for Planning Remedial 
Work, EL Sch. Jr. (17:266), 
December, 19 16 



APPENDIX 357 

*Laura Zirbes Diagnostic Measurements as a Basis 

of Procedure, El.Sch. Jr. (18:505) 
Two valuable and practical studies in helping poor readers to 
overcome the difficulties found by reading tests, 
Guy M. Whipple and Josephine 

Curtis Preliminary Investigation of Skim- 

ming in Reading, Journal of 
Educational Psychology (8:333), 
June, 19 1 7 
Whipple How to Study Effectively, Public 

School Publishing Company 

NEWSPAPER STUDY 

Walter Lippmann and The Test of the, News, New Re- 

Charles Merz public, August 4, 1920 (V. 23, 

No. 296, Part 2). An analysis of 
the Russian news in the New 
York Times from March, 19 17, to 
March, 1920 
Fred Newton Scott The Undefended Gate, E. J. (3:1), 

January, 19 14 
A temperate questioning of the honesty and decency of our chief 
newspapers,- with a supplement containing ample proof of the 
charges. 
Walter Lippmann Liberty and the News, Harcourt, 19 1 7 

THE LIBRARY AND THE DEPARTMENT OP ENGLISH 

C. C. Certain, Chairman Report of Committee on Standard 

Library Equipment and Organ- 
ization. Journal of Educational 
Administration, June, 191 7; N. 
A. E. Proceedings (3:530 ff.), 
April, 1 9 19 
The complete report can be bought (40c.) from the American 
Library Association, 8 Washington St., Chicago, 111. 

Anne T. Eaton The Library and the Department of 

English, E. J., December, 1920 

Fay and Eaton The Use of Books and Libraries, 

Faxon, 1919 
Possibilities of the High School 
Library, American Library Asso- 
ciation, Papers and Proceedings, 
1912; 260 ff. 



358 READING AND LITERATURE 

Earl R. Glenn High School Library Book Selection, 

Library Journal, March 15 and 
April 1, 1 92 1 (26:247 and 297) 
Also in School Science and Mathe- 
matics, March, 1921 (21:217-237) 
An Evaluation of Past and Present Practice in High School Library- 
Book Selection from the Viewpoint of a Science Teacher. Elaborate 
statistical material of great value on the proportion of books for 
various subjects in actual libraries. 
Mary E. Hall Report of the Committee on High 

School Libraries. N. E. A. Pro- 
ceedings (54:671 ff.), 19 1 6 and 

(55'-559 ff-) 1917 

Excellent account of the library week in the Girls' High School, 
Brooklyn. 

Suggestive List of References on 
High School Libraries, New 
York Libraries, May, 1913 
Florence M. Hopkins Is there Need for a Course in the 

Choice and Use of Books in Our 
High Schools? N. E. A. Pro- 
ceedings, 19 1 2, pp. 1285-88 
The Course in Central High School, Detroit, Michigan. 
J. F. Hosic, Chairman Reorganization of English in Second- 

ary Schools, Bureau of Education, 
Bulletin, iqi/:2 
Report on the Library and Its Equipment, pp. 106-22, 
especially pp. 1 14-15. 
W. D. Johnson Relation of the Library to the 

Teaching of English, E. J. (4:21), 
January, 19 15 
Willis H. Kerr The Library as an English Labo- 

ratory, E.J. (2:121), July 24,1915 
Rowena Keith Keyes How We Use Our School Library, 

E. J. (3:86), February, 19 14 
Caroline S. Lutz A Library Tour, E. J. (4 153 1 ) 

Elizabeth Madison A High School Course in Library 

Use, E. J. (5:196), March, 19 16 
Contains an outline for such a course. 
Delia G. Ovitz A Course in Reference Books, 

Bulletin VI 1 ':$, State Normal 
School, Milwaukee, Wisconsin 
0. S. Rice Lessons in the Use of Books and 

Libraries, Rand 



APPENDIX 



359 



New York Library Association Report of Committee on 

School Libraries New 



Committee on Normal School 
Libraries, N.E.A. 

Mrs. T. C. Jones 



(3:182), 



High 

York 

November, 



Libraries 
1912 

Training in the Use of Books 
Library Journal (38:189), April 
1913 

On Beginning a Library, E 
(7:269), April, 1918 



/. 



COST AND EQUIPMENT OF ENGLISH TEACHING 



V. C. Coulter 



Financial Support of English Teach- 
ing, E. J. (1:24), January, 1912 

English Equipment, A Report 
Presented to the National Council 
of Teachers of English. E. J. 
(12:178), March, 1913 

Laboratory Equipment of the 
Teacher of English, E. J. 
(4:145-51), March, 1915 

Report of a Committee of the 

Modern Language Association of 

America and the National 

Council of Teachers of English 

on the Cost and Labor of 

English Teaching 

(This report in a revised and extended form is to be issued soon 

through the Bureau of Education, Washington.) Reported in ///. 

Bulletin (4:8), May, 1913. 



Mary Crawford 



W. M. Hopkins, Chairman 



W. M. Smith, Chairman 



Bureau of Education 



Material Equipment for English 
Teaching. Report of a Committee 
of the Illinois Association of 
Teachers of English, Bulletin 
(8: No. 2), December 15, 1915. 
Reported in the Reorganization 
Report, Bureau of Education 
Bulletin, 1917: No. 2, pp. 
150 ff. 

Study of the Colleges and High 
Schools in the North Central 
Association, U. S. Bureau of 
Education Bulletin No. 6, 19 15, 
pp. 33 ff. and 100-106 



360 READING AND LITERATURE 

CHAPTER VII 

THE CLASS IN LITERATURE 

Alma Allison The Social Problems of Our Little 

Town, E. J. (5:477), September, 
1916 
* Allan Abbott An Experiment in High School 

English, Sch. Rev., Sept., 1904 
Giving freedom to read in upper high school classes and keeping 
an informal record of pupils ' notes on readings and preferences. 

The Use of the School Library, and 

Summer Reading for High School 

Pupils, Teachers College Record 

(9:110 and 124), January, 1908 

To Beginners in English Teaching, 

E. J. 1.41 
The English Teacher and the World 
War, E. J., January, 19 18 
Arlo Bates Talks on Teaching Literature, 

Houghton, 1906 
Chapter 8 is an interesting illustration of teaching Blake's 
The Tiger in informal fashion to a small boy. 
Emma Miller Bolenius The Teaching of Literature in the 

Grammar Grades and High School, 
Houghton, 19 1 5 
Full of class-room devices for teaching various types of literature; 
some quite fruitful. 
Bureau of Education Bulletin, 1918, No. 2, Teaching 

American Ideals through Liter- 
ature 
T. H. Briggs Appreciation as a Basis, III. Bulletin 

(4:6), October, 16, 1916 
Henry Seidel Canby The Teacher of English, Yale Review, 

October, 1914 (N. S. 4, 729) 
The Teaching of English Literature, 
Education (29:179). Nov -» J 9o8 
^Carpenter, Baker and Scott TJie Teaching of English, Longmans, 

1906 
The standard discussion of the entire field; see especially pages, 
52 ff., 155-86 and 250-82. 
Percival Chubb The Teaching of English, Macmillan, 

1902 
Especially Chapters, 2, 5, 10, 14, 15, 16, 



APPENDIX 361 

*H. Caldwell Cook The Play Way, Heinemann, 19 17 

Highly interesting account of an approach to the English subjects- 
through art activities at the Pearse School, Cambridge, England. 
S. M. Crothers The Art of Polite Unlearning 

A. H. R. Fairchild The Teaching of Poetry in the High 

School, Houghton, 19 14 
Haliburton and Smith The Teaching of Poetry in the 

Elementary School, Houghton, 
1911 
Frank L. Hayward The Lesson in Appreciation, 

Macmillan, 19 15. Chapters 1-9 
Some provocative ideas, to be taken with due consideration. 
*W. S. Hinchman The Fringes of Literature, N. E. 

Leaflet, April, 19 17 
Reading Clubs Instead of Literature 
Classes, E. J. (6:88), February, 
1918 
A. M. Hitchcock Voluntary Reading, Henry Holt 

Company, pamphlet (gratis) 
^Elizabeth Hodgson The Adolescent's Prejudice against , 

the Classics, E. J. (4-427), Sep- 
tember, 19 1 5 
*James F. Hosic Empirical Studies in School Read- 

ing, Teachers College Contribu- 
tions to Educational Theory, 
Columbia Univ., 192 1 
Valuable study of the effects of "teaching" as usually practiced 
upon the pupils' choices of literature, and of the annotations and 
questions in texts and reading books, especially Part IV, pp. 56 ff., 
and Part VI. 
S. A. Leonard The Social Group as an Agent in 

Expressional Development, Chap- 
ter 11 of English Composition as 
a Social Problem, Houghton, 19 17 
The Social Recitation, Chicago 
Schools Journal, June, 19 19 
* Alice L. Marsh Social Influences in the Classroom, 

E. J. (5:89), February, 19 16 
An excellent account of a really social group. 
William Allen Neilson The Curse of Memory, E. J. (6:80), 

January, 191 7 
S. C. Parker Methods of Teaching in High Schools t 

Ginn, 1915 
H. G. Paul Memory Work in English Literature, 

///. Bulletin, November 1, 19 14, 
pp. 6 ff. 



362 



READING AND LITERATURE 



H. G. Paul 

W. R. Humphreys 

^Charles S. Pendleton 

A valuable account of 
*Sarah E. Simons 

Classroom procedures 
48 and 180-230. 
C. Alphonso Smith 

M. Ell wood Smith 



The Teaching of Lyric Poetry, E. J. 
(1:466 and 521), October and 
November, 191 2 

The Study of the Novel, 111. Bulle- 
tin, November, 19 13 

Literary Study of the Bible, E. J., 
April, 19 1 7 

The Bible in the Junior High 
School, E. J. (7:623) 
a fruitful procedure. 

English Problems in the Solving, 
Scott, Foresman, 1920 
are discussed helpfully on pages 26-41, 117- 

Memory Work in Literature, Sch. 

Rev. (12:224), March, 1904 
The Coroner on English Literature, 

E. J. (7:551), November, 1918 



CHAPTER VIII 
BACKGROUNDS AND ILLUSTRATIVE MATERIAL 



Jeanette F. Abrams 

Stanley Brown 

F. L. Hayward 
Claud Howard 
*J. F. Hosic, Editor 

Helen Logasa 
Julia Davenport Randall 
Milton M. Smith 
Cecil Sharp 



Airs for Songs in the Golden 
Treasury, E. J. (4:387), June, 
19 1 5, and in English Leaflet, 
February, 19 19 

Pictures in the High School, III. 
Bulletin (7 No. 2), November, 
1914 

The Lesson in Appreciation, Chapters 
4 and 9, Macmillan, 1915 

The Use of Pictures in Teaching 
Literature, E. J. (5:539) 

Report of the Committee on 

Reorganization of English in 

Secondary Schools, Bulletin of 

U. S. Bureau of Education, 1917, 

No. 2, pp. 112-20 

Story of an Ivanhoe Exhibit, E. J. 

(6:i75) 
My Bridge Approach, in Blessing 

Esau, Badger, 19 19 
Dancing through English Literature, 

E. J. (9:305). June, 1920 
The Country Dance Book 
The Morris Book, H. W. Gray 



APPENDIX 363 

Frances Simpson Where Shall I Look? ///. Bulletin 

(4:7), April i, 1912 
Illustrative Material, ///. Bulletin 
(4:8), April 1, 1912 
Pictures, ballad facs imiles and the like. 
Jessie L. Thompson The Correlation of Music with 

Literature, E. J. (10:376), Sep- 
tember, 192 1 
List of phonograph records for use in literature classes. The prin- 
cipal phonograph companies publish complete lists. 
Cornelia Carhart Ward The Use of Pictures in the Teach- 

ing of Literature, E. J. (4:526), 
(4:671), (5:274). (6:267), (6:348) 
Very full lists, well classified; a list of catalogues of prints. 
Pictures for the Old Testament Narratives, from the Tissot Paintings, 
may be bought from the New York Sunday School Commission, 
Inc., 73 Fifth Avenue, New York City. 
* Illustrated editions of classics are further listed by Miss Mary E. Hall 
in the Wilson Bulletin for June, 19 16. (H. W. Wilson Co., New 
York City.) 

BIBLIOGRAPHY ON BALLADS 
Most of this was prepared under the direction of Dr. Ernest Horn, 

University of Iowa; excellent teaching of literature is done 

simply by singing the ballads in the Elementary School there. 
John Ashton Modern Street Ballad 

An old book, not on the market. Interesting examples of the 

broadside. 

F. J. Childs English and Scottish Popular Ballads 

(five volumes), Houghton, 1904 
Expensive but the most reliable source book. Child's Volume V 
may be consulted for melodies. These are not harmonized. 

Padraic Colum Broad-Sheet Ballads, Norman; 

Remington, 19 14 
Irish popular songs; Jack Yeats illustrations. 
Arthur Be atty Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome, 

Scribner 

Emma Miller Bolenius Teaching of Literature in the Gram- 

mar Grades and High School, 
Houghton 
Excellent chapter on teaching ballads. 
A. Clark Shirburn Book of Ballads, Oxford, 

1907 
Interesting examples of the broadside. 



364 READING AND LITERATURE 

F. B. Gummere The Popular Ballad, Houghton, 

1907 

The best book for the teacher's preparation; deals with ballad 

characteristics, history, etc. 

Old English Ballads, Ginn 

In Warner's Library of the World's 

Best Literature, Volume III, pp. 

1305-7 
Brief, usable treatment of the popular ballad. 

E. E. Hale Ballads and Ballad Poetry, Globe 

School Book, 1907 
W. M. Hart English Popular Ballads, Scott, 19 16 

T. F. Henderson The Ballad in Literature, Putnam, 

1912 
Of moderate value as a teacher's reference book. 
Sidney Lanier The Boy's Percy, Scribner 

Ballads from Percy's Reliques 
J. A. Lomax Cowboy Songs, Sturges & Walton 

D. F. McCarthy Book of Irish Ballads, Marlier 

Edwin Ford Piper Some Play Part}'' Games of the 

Middle West '(Pamphlet) Pub- 
lished in American Journal of 
Folklore (28:262), 19 15 
Good collection of play party games, with excellent description of 
such parties. 
A. T. Quiller-Couch Oxford Book of Ballads, Oxford, 1910 

While requiring some revising of lines and stanzas for children, this 
is most complete at moderate price. 
Arthur Rackham, Illustrator Some British Ballads, Dodd, 1920 

Clinton Scollard Ballads, Patriotic and Romantic, 

Gomme, 19 16 
Ballads of American Bravery, Silver, 
Burdette, 1900 
Poor collection, but interesting for certain phases of history. 

F. Sidgwick Legendary Ballads, Lippincott 

G. H. Stempel A Book of Ballads, Holt, 19 17 

Probably the best single book to put in the hands of children. Con- 
tains excellent notes and helps for the teacher. 
Witham and Netlson English and Scottish Popular Ballads , 

Houghton, 1909 
Good collection; good introduction. 
Louise Pound Poetic Origins and the Ballad, 

Macmillan, 192 1 



APPENDIX 



365 



CHAPTER IX 
COMPOSITION FOR THE REALIZATION OF LITERATURE 



Frank Aydelotte 
H. G. Paul 

H. Caldwell Cook 

Chapters on dramatic and 
C. A. Dawson 

*John Dewey 

J. Frank Dobie 

Useful ideas on word study, 
Samuel Earle 

W. W. Hatfield 

J. F. Hosic, Editor 



*Easley S. Jones 

Mary E. Jennes 

Rowena Keyes 
S. A. Leonard 

Helen Ogden Mahin 



Robert Louis Stevenson, Darkening 
Counsel, E. J. (1:340), June, 1912 

Teaching of Prosody, ///. Bulletin 
(10:2), November, 1917 

The Play Way, Heinemann, 19 17 
other composition. 

Two Experiments in Experience, E. 
J. (2:437) 

Democracy and Education — 
Macmillan, 1916, pp. 6, 21 ff., 
278, 321, 393, etc. 

"Words, Words, Words, My Lord" 
E. J. (8:8), January, 19 19 
with some bibliography. 

Examinations in English, E. J. 
(3:612), 6, December, 19 14 

"Functional" Tests, E. J. (5:696), 
December, 19 16 

Reorganization of English in 
Secondary Schools, Bureau of 
Education Bulletin, 19 17, No. 2. 
"Separation of the Teaching of 
Composition and the Teaching 
of Literature," pp. 128-30 

What to Write About, III. Bulletin 
(7:4), January, 19 15 

The Teaching of Description, Ibid. 
(8:1), October 15, 1915 

Ideas for Narration, Ibid. (9:7), 
April, 19 1 7 

Cooperative Fiction N. E. Leaflet, 
December, 19 16 

Quoted in Simons' English Prob- 
lems in the Solving, pp. 12 1-3 

Felicia: An Experiment in De- 
scriptive Writing, E. J. (6:615) 

English Composition as a Social 
Problem, Boston, 191 7 

Composition subjects from chil- 
dren's experiences, Ch. I; Word- 
Study, Ch. IV, pp. 167-184 

English Composition and Fuller 
Living, E. J. (4:445), September, 
1915 



366 READING AND LITERATURE 

Myra L. McCoy Local Color, E. J. (7:331) 

Mary Elizabeth Shelley Concerning Mist — and a Whip, 

■E- J- (3=539), November, 1914 
S.C.Smith Poetic Triteness, E. J. (1:547), 

November, 19 12 
Sarah E. Simons English Problems in the Solving, 

Scott, 1920 
"Imitation a Means of Appreciation," pp. 139-48. 
Contrast Mr. Aydelotte's article, referred to above. 
C. S. Thomas Teaching of English in Secondary 

Schools, Houghton, 19 16 
Full and interesting lists of theme subjects. 

See also various pieces of writing by children or in the style of chil- 
dren (by Barrie, Phillpotts, Grahame) in the lists for Chapter 2 
above. The ///. Bulletin for February, 19 16. contains further 
bibliography. 

CHAPTER X 
DRAMATIZATION AND STUDY OF PLAYS 

Percival Chubb Festivals and Plays in School and 

Elsewhere, Harper, 19 12 
Helen Joseph A Book of Marionettes, Huebsch, 

1920 
Illustrated history of the puppet plays. 
Roy Mitchell Shakespeare for Community Players, 

Dutton, 19 19 
Illustrated with cuts of costumes, properties, etc. 
Constance D'Arcy Mackay Costumes and Scenery for Amateurs, 

Holt, 1915 _ 
Illustrations of costume, setting, and properties. 
*Brander Matthews The Development of the Drama, 

Scribner, 1906 
A Study of the £>rama,Houghton, 19 1 o 
Valuable studies of plays as intended for, and modified by, the 
theaters, actors and audience of their own day. 
Charlotte Porter A Guide to Shakespeare's Stage, 

Drama League, 19 16 
A Midsummer Night's Dream as a 
Folk-Pageant, Drama, Nos. 26 
and 27; 191 7 (7:217 and 461) 
Discusses the possible derivation of the Elizabethan round theaters 
from the Roman amphitheaters in England; Midsummer Night's 
Dream produced after the pageant tradition, without the cuts of 
modern editorship. Valuable articles for reconstructing the 
Elizabethan play. 



APPENDIX 367 

Tony Sarg The Tony Sarg Marionette Booh, 

Huebsch, 192 1. Directions, illus- 
trations, plays 
Olive Sayler Tudor Twelfth Night in Russia, 

Drama (10:5), October, 1919 
*Percy Simpson Scenes from Old Playbooks, Oxford, 

1906 
Valuable introduction on the quality of drama and the Eliza- 
bethan theater, and selections from Elizabethan plays. 
Clarence Stratton Producing in Little Theaters, Holt, 

1921 
A. H. Thorndike Shakespeare's Theater, New York, 

1916 
The best account and reconstruction of all the conditions of the 
theater. 

ON SCHOOL STUDY AND DRAMATIZATION OF PLAYS 

Allan Abbott School Production of Shakespeare's 

Plays. Shakespearian Studies, 

Columbia Univ., 19 16 
A High School Course in Drama, 

E. J. (2:93), 1912 
Allan Abbott and Helen Moss Bibliography of Shakespeare and 

His Time for Schools, Teachers 

College Record (17:184), 1916 
Franklin T. Baker Shakespeare in the Schools, E. J., 

May, 19 16 (5:299), also in 

Shakespearian Studies, Columbia 

Univ., 1916 
Julia L. C. Brookins A Midsummer Night's Dream in 

the Junior High School, E. J., 

October, 19 18 
Carpenter, Baker and Scott The Teaching of English. The 

Drama, pp. 276-281, Longmans, 

1906 
C. C. Certain The Trail of Banquo, E. J. (4:152) 

Martha Clay The Hat Box in Literature, E. J., 

December, 1916 (5:680) 
Miniature stages and theaters made by pupils for better realization 
of the conditions under which plays are to be understood. 
*H. Caldwell Cook The Play Way, Heinemann, 1917 

Most individual writing and production of plays by boys in the 
Pearse School, Cambridge, England. 
Percival Chubb The Teaching of English, pp. 268 ff. 

Eleanora Whitman Curtis Dramatic Instinct in Education, 

Houghton, 1914 



368 READING AND LITERATURE 

Alec M. Drummond For the Director of Dramatics, E. J. ■ 

(6:658), 1917 
An Adventure in Dramatics, E. J. 

(8:623), 1919 
"A little country theater" at the New York State Fair. 
Emma Sheridan Fry Educational Dramatics, Lloyd 

Adams Noble, 2d edition, 1917 
Alice Minnie Herts The Children's Educational Theater, 

Harper, 191 1 
Henniger TheKingdomof the Child, Ibid., 19 16 

EVELYENE HlLLARD, THEODORA 

McCormick and Kate Oglebay Amateur and Educational Dramatics, 

Macmillan, 1917 
Departure from conventional instruction. 
*John Merrill Drama and the School, Drama 

(10:22 and 66), October and 

November, 1919 

An excellent account of dramas developed into action on a basis of 

children's own interpretation and of beautiful simple effects in stage 

setting and lighting. 

H. G. Paul Study of the Drama, ///. Bulletin 

(8:7), April 15, 1916 
Ina M. Perego The Little Theater in the High 

School, E. J. (5:483) 
Miss Gena Thompson's experiment at South Bend, Indiana. 
Sarah E. Simons English Problems in the Solving, 

Scott, Foresman, "Shakespeare," 
pp. 211-21; "Dramatization as a 
Means of Appreciation, " 148-60; 
Anna McColm The Drama, 
197 ff. 
Sarah E. Simons and Dramatization, Scott, Foresman, 

Clemm Irwin Orr 19 13 

The introduction contains suggestions for producing plays simply; 
the plays in the book are not pupils' composition. 
^Margaret Skinner Socializing Dramatics, E. J. (9 448), 

October, 1920 
A most concrete and valuable discussion of truly social work. 
Clarence Stratton A Shakespeare Festival in Time of 

War, E. J., November, 19 16 
Three Points for Educational De- 
partments. Drama, 10:31 
O. B, Sperlin The Production of Plays in High 

School, E. J. (5:172), March, 1916 
Frank G. Tompkins The Play Course in High School, 

E. J. (9:530), November, 1920 



APPENDIX 369 

Randolph C. Wilson The Schoolboy's Nightmare, E. J. 

(1:619), 1912 
Various pedagogical tortures, including the dramatization of "I 
wandered lonely as a cloud, " are inflicted on the boy. 

LISTS OF PLAYS FOR SCHOOL READING 

A List of Plays for High School and College Production; Prepared by 
Committees of the Drama League of America and of the National 
Council of Teachers of English, 19 16 (25c.) Now out of print, 
but in process of revision, by a joint committee headed by Mr. 
Clarence Stratton. 

Alec M. Drummond Plays for the Time, E. J. , September, 

1919 (8:419) 

Gertrude Johnson Choosing a Play, Century, 1920 

Very full classified lists. 

Raymond W. Pence Notes on the One-Act Play, ///. 

Bulletin 12:8, May 1, 1920 

A bibliography in the Atlantic Book of Modern Plays, Atlantic 
Monthly Press, 1921. 

Clarence Stratton Producing in Little Theaters, Holt, 

1921 
Lists of one-act plays and of longer dramas. 



24 



APPENDIX II 



READING LISTS FOR PUPILS IN ELEMENTARY AND 
HIGH SCHOOLS 

Our discussion thus far is designed to indicate what man should 

read. Obviously it is that which will present to him a full and adequate 

revelation of the vast human drama in which he plays his part; 

and of the stage upon which it is enacted and by which conditioned. 

Franklin Bobbitt, The Curriculum. 

AS TO THE BOOK LISTS 

The following lists, as has been stated in the text, are designed 
to give children as varied and real as possible an experience of life. 
They are in no sense either complete or satisfactory; it is with the 
hope of getting criticisms and suggestions, of both inclusion and 
omission, that they are now published. It is particularly desirable 
to get children's own reactions to these books. Anyone who will 
send me brief reports written by children on any of these titles will 
confer a great favor, and may help in getting together lists which 
are a very real help to the teacher and the librarian. 

The grading suggested here is but a rough guess. In any case 
it can refer only to the lowest limit at which, in general, a book is 
likely to be of interest. And yet, as in the series " chiefly for fun " 
and "tales of adventure" in the senior high school lists, there are a 
number of books in which many pupils in grades below those sug- 
gested will find pleasure. As has been proposed, it is probably 
better for a pupil to be referred to books in lower-grade lists than 
that he spend his time on the usual "stepping-stone" books, which 
are rarely of any particular value in bridging to excellent literature 
and are usually merely a waste of time. 

The lists are divided into three classes, but in the groupings 
there has been no attempt at rigid classification; in fact, every effort 
should probably be made to tempt pupils across the boundary line 
from books of history and biography and the like to readings in 
fiction, from fiction to poetry, and vice versa. 

I. The fundamental books for each grade group are in general 
those thoroughly accepted and excellent ones which are now the basis 
of courses in literature, or which, in the opinion of the compiler 
and of several critics of this list, should be added to the range from 
which such basic readings may be chosen. In all cases, as with 

370 



APPENDIX 371 

most of the lists, in fact, these books need the help of teachers to 
promote them and insure their apprehension by pupils. They will, 
then, in most cases be approached and considered in literature classes 
in such ways as are suggested in Chapters 7-10 of this study. 

These books are selected on the basis of Professor F. T. Baker's 
suggestion 1 : 

"It is time for us to consider seriously how, out of the large 
choice offered, we can select at least a group of books that we can 
somehow induce or beguile a child into reading until they become 
a part of him." 

That such a list is particularly in need of careful checking and 
revision is quite obvious. 

I have endeavored, further, to mark in this list the very few 
books which we are at present able to say should be read in every 
school, and to note the particular grades in which they should perhaps 
be considered. This I have done for the high school mainly on the 
basis of a study to be published soon in the Illinois Bulletin, prepared 
by a committee headed by Miss Clara N. Hawks of the Cicero 
Township High School, Cicero, Illinois. 

2. The supplementary reading lists contain a wide variety of 
books whose chief good is not their subject matter, but the insight 
into experience which they assist children to gain. In some cases, 
particularly in the senior high school years, certain titles are 
to be recommended only to individual pupils of sufficient maturity 
and experience to understand them aright. All of them are doubtless 
the better for skilful promotion on the part of the teachers — in the 
form of inviting notes on the book-list or the bulletin board, and 
particularly of individual recommendations, and discussion to help 
in their right understanding. 

3. The "subject-matter" books are in all cases the choice of the 
teachers whose names appear in connection with them, and who valule 
them for their aid in giving pupils an understanding of history or 
science or arts and an interest in continuing these subjects. It is 
probable that these books in particular can well be tested further by 
the criterion of realizableness, and English teachers who can them- 
selves read these and have their pupils read them are urged to help 
in discussing these lists. 

Publishers' names have been given in cases where it seemed 
helpful to add these, but there are, of course, many editions of a 
great number of these books, and often other choices will be pref- 
erable. The American publishers' full name and address can be 
found in the United States Catalogue. No attempt has been made 

* Introduction to "A Bibliography of Children's Reading," Teachers College 
Record (9:1-65). See pages 39-45 of Dr. Baker's "Bibliography" for a list of 
fundamental books for the elementary school. 



372 READING AND LITERATURE 

to give prices of books, as these, particularly for books issued before 
1917, are entirely unreliable, and changes are being constantly made 
now. The best recourse is to write directly to publishers for their 
latest lists and for their special prices to libraries and schools. 

All in all, the choice in these bibliographies represents a consensus 
upon available books both in literature and in other subjects, 
but by no means a complete view or a thoroughly desirable selection. 
They are made up with the aid of several of the lists noted below ; 
chiefly those marked (*). Notes by Professors Stevens and Baker, 
Miss Eaton, and Mrs. Mussey have been freely borrowed. I am 
indebted to Miss Louise Griswold for help on the high-school 
lists in her work for English- 190s in the summer school of 1921. 

SOME LISTS OF CHILDREN'S BOOKS 

American Library Association, Children's Books for Christmas Presents, 
A. L. A., Chicago. 

* Franklin T. Baker A Bibliography of Children's Read- 

ing, Teachers College Record 
(9:1-111) 
The best list for Elementary Schools, well based and selected, and 
annotated. Excellent introduction. 

*Boy Scouts of America, Library Commission, Books for Boy Scouts, 
200 Fifth Avenue, New York. 

Brooklyn Public Library, Books that Girls Like. 

Buffalo Public Library, Books to Grow On. An experimental inter- 
mediate list selected from the Open Shelf Room. 

Carnegie Library, Pittsburgh, Illustrated Editions of Children's Books. 
Stories to Tell to Children, with stories and poems for holiday pro- 
grams, and other lists. 

* Committee of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association, Stand- 

ardizing Library Work and Library Equipment for History in 
Secondary School, Sch. Rev. (29:135) 
Drama Department, New York Community Service, List of Pageants, 

Festivals and Masques. 
Edith Erskine Science and Technology Books for 

the High School Library, Chicago 
Public Library 
Girl Scouts, Reference Reading for Girls in Scouting, in Official Hand- 
book, Girl Scouts, Inc., 189 Lexington Ave., New York City. 

* Mary E. Hall Books for the Browsing Corner of a 

High School Library 
The Wilson Bulletin (Vol. 1, No. 7) 
Illustrated editions of classics — an excellent list. 
Harriet E. Hassler A Graded List of Stories for Read- 

ing Aloud, American Library 
Association 



APPENDIX 



373 



The World of Books, Central High 
School, Newark, N. J. 
Lists interesting books in many subjects, government bulletins, and 
the like. 

Out-of -Doors Books, Specially read- 
able for high school or college. 
Book Shop for Boys and Girls, 264 
Boylston St., Boston 
Reorganization of English in 
Secondary Schools, Bulletin 19 17, 
No. 2, U. S. Bureau of Education 
The Elementary Course in English, 

Chicago Univ. Press 
The Book Shelf for Boys and Girls, 
R. R. Bowker Co., 62 W. 45th 
St., N. Y. City 
Books for Vacation Reading. 
The Lincoln School, New York 
City 
Based on children's selections, and in many cases annotated by 
children of grades seven to ten. 
Los Angeles Public Library Ships and Sailor Men 



Max J. Herzberg 



Marion Horton 



*J. F. Hosic, Chairman 



Clara W. Hunt, 

Franklin K. Mathiews 
and Ruth G. Hopkins 

*Anne T. Eaton 



Illinois Association of 

Teachers of English 
B. E. Mahoney 



III. 



"A suggestive 
A. M. Hitchcock 



Book List for High Schools, 

Bulletin, 6, No. 5 
Books for Boys and Girls, Revised. 
Book Shop for Boys and Girls, 
264 Boylston St., Boston 
purchase list." 

Journeys in Fiction, Allyn (10c) 



* Annie Carroll More Roads to Childhood, Doran, ($1.50) 

Two lists of Books for Children 
compiled from articles in The 
Bookman 
(Mrs.) Mabel H. B. Mussey The Nation (New York), The 

Holiday Book Numbers 
Those for the past three or four years have contained especially 
valuable reviews. 

^National Council of Teachers Report of the Committee upon 
of English Home Reading, 506 West 69th 

St., Chicago (10c; 60c a dozen, 
postpaid) 

* Newark Free Public Library Reading for Pleasure and Profit, 

Fourth Edition. Published for 
"High School Students and Other 
Readers " 



374 READING AND LITERATURE 

Wm. P. Wharton New York Association of Teachers 

of English, Report of Committee 
on Contemporary Literature. 
High School of Commerce, 
New York City (15c) 
New York Public Library Favorite Stories for Library 

Reading Clubs 
Heroism: A Reading List for Boys 
and Girls, Patriotism and other 
lists 
Jacqueline Overton List of Books for Boys and Girls 

Suggested for Purchase 
Marian Cutler, Children's Book- 
shop, 5 W. 47th St., New York 
City (35c) 
*Leonore St. John Powell Some Children's Book Lists. Library 

Journal (46:896) 
A good list of lists, the basis of this one. 
Effie L. Power Lists of Stories and Programs for 

Story Hour. H. W. Wilson Co., 
New York City 
* David H. Stevens The Home Guide to Good Reading, 

F. J. Drake & Co., Chicago 
Generous lists, with helpful annotations, grouped by ages. 
C. S. Thomas Leaflet of the New England Asso- 

ciation of Teachers of English, 
17:146 
H. W. Wilson Co. Standard Catalog Bibliography of 

Children's Books 
Pittsburg Library Catalog of Children's Books 

These last are large, exhaustive lists. 
Margaret Wilson Books for High Schools, Bulletin 

41, U. S. Bureau of Education 
Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, Wisconsin Reading 
Circle Board: Lists of Books for High School Libraries, Reading 
Circle Lists. 
University of Wisconsin A List of Books for General Reading, 

Revised, 1921 
Comments on admitted classics for reading of college grade. 



A. PRIMARY GRADES (KINDERGARTEN THROUGH 
FOURTH GRADE) 



A BRIEF LIST OF CHOICE BOOKS FOR CHILDREN'S 

READING 

Compiled by Annie E. Moore, 

Assistant Professor in Elementary Education 

Teachers College, Columbia University. 

GRADE I 
CHILDREN ABOUT 6-7 YEARS 

Caldecott Picture Books, Nos. I and II, F. Warne. 

A good Mother Goose collection, such as E. Boyd Smith Mother Goose, 

Jessie Wilcox Smith Mother Goose, Old Mother Goose Rhyme Book, 

Illustrated by Anne Anderson. 
Leslie Brooke Johny Crow 's Garden, F. Warne 

Helen Bannerman Little Black Sambo, F. A. Stokes 

Beatrix Potter Peter Rabbit, F. Warne 

Georgene Faulkner Old English Nursery Tales, Daugh- 

aday 
Valery Carrick Picture Tales from the Russian, 

Longmans 

GRADE II 



CHILDREN ABOUT 7-8 YEARS 



Edward Lear 
R. L. Stevenson 



Leslie Brooke 
Clement C. Moore 



Baldwin 
Bigham 



Lucy F. Perkins 
Valery Carrick 



Nonsense Book, Duffield 

Child's Garden of Verses, Rand. 
With Jessie Wilcox Smith illus- 
trations, Scribner 

Golden Goose Book, Warne 

'Twas the Night Before Christmas. 
Illustrated by Jessie W. Smith, 
Houghton, 19 1 2 

Fairy Stories and Fables, American 
Book Co. 

Merry Animal Tales, Rand 

Hiawatha Primer, edited by Hol- 
brook, Houghton 

The Dutch Twins, Houghton 

More Picture Tales from the Russian 

375 



2>7b 



READING AND LITERATURE 



GRADE III 



COLLODI 



Lewis Carroll 



Baldwin 



Craik 

Kipling 

Wiggin and Smith 

Lucy F. Perkins 



CHILDREN ABOUT 8-9 YEARS 

Pinocchio, the Adventures of a Marion- 
ette, Ginn; Folkard illustrations, 
Dutton 

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, 
G. H. Putnam (Tenniel illus- 
trations); Doubleday (Rackham 
illustrations) 

Fifty Famous Stories Retold, Amer- 
ican Book Co. 

Robinson Crusoe Told Anew, Amer- 
ican Book Co. 

Adventures of a Brownie, Harper 

Just-So-Stories, Doubleday 

The Posy Ring, a Book of Verses for 
Children, Doubleday 

The Japanese Twins, Houghton 



GRADE IV 



CHILDREN ABOUT 8-9 YEARS 



Kipling 


The Jungle Book, Century 


Mabie 


Fairy Tales Every Child Should 




Know, Doubleday 


Craik 


The Little Lame Prince, Rand 


Sewell 


Black Beauty, A. L. Burt 


Wiggin 


The Birds' Christmas Carol, 




Houghton 


Joel C. Harris 


Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Say- 




ings, Frost illustrations, Appleton 


The Arabian Nights, edited by Wiggin and Smith, illustrated by 



Maxfield Parrish, Scribner 
Hawthorne The Wonder Book and Tanglewood 

Tales, illustrated by Maxfield 
Parrish; Dumeld; Crane illustra- 
tions, Houghton 
These books are for the children to read. The compiler of the list 
believes that it is possible to judge only approximately the appropriate 
grade for any given collection or literary whole. It is not intended to 
imply, for example, that Stevenson's Poems and The Posy Ring belong 
peculiarly in Second and Third Grade. They are placed there because 
pupils can probably read very little in these books at an earlier period. 

Annie E. Moore. 



APPENDIX 



377 



Hans Christian Andersen 
Fairy Tales 



P. J. Asbjornsen 



KINDERGARTEN AND PRIMARY GRADES 
ADDITIONAL TITLES 

CHILDREN ABOUT 4-10 YEARS 
Aesop Fables Opper illustrations, Lippincott, 1916 

E. Boyd Smith illustrations, 

Century 
J. H. Stickney selections, Bull 

illustrations, Ginn 
Jacobs edition, Heighway illus- 
trations, Macmillan 
Rackham illustrations, Heinemann, 

London 
Winter illustrations, Rand 
Rhead illustrations, Harper 
Robinson illustrations, Holt 
Dulac illustrations, Doran 
Norse Fairy Tales from Dasent, 

Lippincott 
Fairy Tales, Anne Thackeray 

Ritchie introduction, Scribner 
Firelight Stories, Bradley 
Children's First Book of Poetry, 

American Book Co. 
The Wizard of Oz, Bobbs-Merrill 
Marvelous Land of Oz, Reilly 
Songs of Innocence 
The Piper, The Tiger, The Lamb, 

Putman 
Knowing Insects through Stories, 

Funk 
The Cozy Lion, Century 
"A lion who lives on breakfast foods until he loses his taste for 
blood that he may have children as playmates. Highly amusing. ' ' 
— Stevens. 
E. Braine Merchant Ships and V/hat They 

Bring Us, Dutton 
"Gives a real understanding of the great world and its doings. " — 
Stevens. 

Through the Looking Glass, Crowell 
Hunting of the Snark, Jabberwocky, 

Putnam 
The Brownies, Century, illustrated 
The Tortoise and the Geese 
Fables of Bidpai, E. Boyd Smith 
illustrations, Houghton 
W. A. Dyer Dogs of Boytown, Holt 



M. C. Aulnoy 

Carolyn S. Bailey 
Emilie Kipp Baker 

L. Frank Baum 

William Blake 



Frank Bralliar 



Frances Hodgson Burnett 



Carroll 



Palmer Cox 

Maude Barrows Dutton 



37* 



READING AND LITERATURE 



Kate Greenway Under the Window 

Marigold Garden 
Mother Goose, Warne 
Leslie Brooke illustrations, Warne 
Rackham illustrations, Doubleday 
Crane illustrations, Macmillan 
Lucas translation, Lippincott 
Christmas Every Day, The Pony 
Engine, The Pumpkin Glory, 
Harper. In Howells Story Book, 
Scribner 
Little Mr. Thimblefinger Stories, 

Houghton 
Watty Wanderoon, Doubleday 
Girls and Boys 
Our Children, Duffield; Boutet de 

Monvel illustrations 
Water Babies, Jessie W. Smith 
illustrations, Dodd; Robinson 
illustrations, Houghton 
Little Red Riding Hood 
Princess of the Glass Hill, Longmans 
The Cock, the Mouse, and the Little 
Red Hen, Tony Sarg illustrations, 
Jacobs 
Old Dutch Nursery Rhymes, Tunes, 

H. Rontgen 
Little Songs of Long Ago, Original 
tunes by Alfred Moffatt, McKay 
Four and Twenty Toilers, McDevitt 
Book Shop 
"Picture and story explain to children of four to six years the trades 
of the ship-builder, the cobbler, the miller and others. " — Stevens. 
Charles Elliott Norton The Heart of Oak Books, Heath 

" The two volumes of rhymes, fables and nursery tales are excellent 
in every way and yet inexpensive. "—Stevens. 
Frances J. Olcott Book of Elves and Fairies, Houghton 

Lucy Fitch Perkins The Eskimo Twins 

The Scotch Twins 
The Irish Twins, Houghton 
Further delightfully told and illustrated stories of children of other 
lands. 
Beatrix Potter The Tailor of Gloucester, Warne 

Katherine Pyle Mother's Nursery Tales, illustrations 

by the author, Dutton 
Tales of Folk and Fairies, Little, 
Brown 



Grimms ' Fairy Tales 



Howells 



Joel Chandler Harris 



Anatole France 



Kingsley 



Andrew Lang 



Le Fevre 



Henrietta W. LeMaire 



E. V. Lucas 



APPENDIX 



379 



Howard Pyle 
Horace E. Scudder 



The Wonder Clock, Harper 
Book of Fables and Folk Stories, 
Houghton, illustrations by 
Maurice Day 
The Children's Book, Houghton 
"A 'one- volume' library for children of five to nine years that lives 
up to the promises of its title. " — Stevens. 
Ada Maria Skinner Merry Tales, American Book Co. 

Nursery Tales of Many Lands, 
Scribner 
E. Boyd Smith Farm Book 

Railroad Book, Houghton 
Mrs. David S. Snedden Docas, The Indian Boy, Heath 

G. C. Warner Star Stories for Little Folks, Pilgrim 

Press 



INTERMEDIATE GRADES (FIFTH TO SEVENTH) 
CHILDREN FROM ABOUT 9-13 YEARS 
1. FUNDAMENTAL READINGS 
Most of them purely for fun. 



Emilie Kipp Baker 



James Barrie 



Robert Browning 



A. J. Church 



Defoe 



Kenneth Grahame 

Lucretia Hale 
J. C. Harris 

Bret Harte 



Joseph Jacobs 



Children's Second Book of Poetry, 
American Book Co. 

Out of the Northland — Norse Myths, 
Macmillan 

Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens 

Peter and Wendy, Scribner 

The Pied Piper, Dunlap illustrations, 
Rand 

Story of the Iliad 

Story of the Odyssey 

The Aeneid for Boys and Girls, 
Illustrated, Macmillan 

Adventures of Crusoe on His Island, 
Rhead illustrations, Harper; Boyd 
Smith illustrations, Houghton 

Wind in the Willows, Bransom illus- 
trations, Scribner 

Peterkin Papers, Houghton 

Nights with Uncle Remus, Houghton, 
Milo Winter illustrations 

The Heathen Chinee in Halleck and 
Barbour: Readings from Liter- 
ature, American 

Celtic Fairy Tales 

English Fairy Tales 

Indian Fairy Tales, Putnam 



3 8o 



READING AND LITERATURE 



A. and E. Keary Heroes of Asgard, F. A. Owen 

Kingsley Greek Heroes, Illustrated, Ginn 

Charles and Mary Lamb Tales from Shakespeare, Paget illus- 

trations or Rackham illustra- 
tions, Dutton; Illustrations from 
trie Valpy Shakespeare, Ginn; 
Rhead illustrations, Harper 

Adventures of Ulysses, Ginn 

Complete Nonsense Book, The Jum- 
blies and Others, Dufneld; Crowell 

The Blue Bird for Children, Dodd 

Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, 
Scribner 

Adventures of Baron Munchausen, 
Houghton; Altemus 

Home Book of Verse for Young 
People, Holt 

The Queen's Museum and other 
Fanciful Tales, Scribner 

The Rose and the Ring, Author's 
illustrations, John Murray, Lon- 
don, or Smith and Elder, London 

Such Nonsense, an Anthology, 
Scribner 

Tales of Laughter 

Tales of V/onder 

Golden Numbers (verse) Doubleday 

2. OTHER FICTION AND POETRY 
Arabian Nights, Olcott, Pogany illustrations, Holt; Wiggin and 
Smith, Parrish illustrations, Scribner; Dulac illustrations, Hodder, 
London, Doran; Andrew Lang, editor — Longmans. 
P. C. Asbjornsen Tales from the Fjeld, from Dasent; 

Putnam 
R. N. Bain Cossack Fairy Tales, Burt; Scribner; 

Stokes 
Russian Fairy Tales from the Skazki 
f i of Polevoi, Burt 

^ames Baldwin Fifty Famous Stories, American 

The Story of Roland, Scribner 
Katherine Lee Bates Fairy Gold, Dutton 

"Delightful modern poems and nonsense verses." — Stevens. 
Margaret Evans Once Upon a Time, Rand, Price- 

illustrations 



Lear 

Maeterlinck 
Pyle 

Rudolph Eric Raspe 

Burton Stevenson 

Frank R. Stockton 

Thackeray 

Carolyn Wells 
Wiggin and Smith 



E. F. Benson 
Luigi Bertelli 



David Blaize and 

Doran 
The Prince and His Ants, Holt 



Blue Door, 



APPENDIX 



381 



Mary L. B. Branch 



Abbie Brown 



Frances Hodgson Burnett 



H. H. Boyesen 
Charles E. Carryll 

Padraic Colum 



Dinah M. Craik 



Crockett 



Guld, the Cavern King, Bookshop for 
Boys and Girls, Boston; Sherman, 
French & Co. 
In the Days of the Giants 
Book of Saints and Friendly Beasts, 

Houghton 
The Secret Garden, Stokes 
The Lost Prince 
The Cozy Lion, Century 
Norseland Tales, Scribner 
Davy and the Goblin, Houghton 
Admiral's Caravan, Century 
The Girl who Sat by the Ashes, 
Dugald Walker illustrations, 
Macmillan 
Adventures of Odysseus and the] Tale 
of Troy, Pogany illustrations, 
Macmillan— School edition 
The Golden Fleece, Ibid. 
The Little Lame Prince, A Parable, 
Crowell; Harper; Rand (Dunlap 
illustrations) ; Lippincott 
Red- Cap Tales, Macmillan 
''Excellent introduction to Scott, admirably retold. " — F. T. Baker. 
Alice Turner Curtis A Yankee Girl at Bull Run, Penn 

An exceptionally good story for little girls; the sympathies are 
nicely balanced, the setting has real atmosphere, and the charac- 
ters are distinctly worth while. " — Mabel H. B. Mussey. 
Louis Dodge The Sandman's Forest, Scribner 

Mary Mapes Dodge Hans Brinker or the Silver Skates, 

Scribner 
N. H. Dole White Duckling and Other Stories, 

Crowell 
New edition of the Russian Fairy Book. 
Elsie Spicer Eells Tales of Giants from Brazil, Dodd 

Tales of Enchantment from Spam, 
Harcourt ; Petersham illustrations 
Clayton Ernst Blind Trails, Little, Brown 

"Well written, clean and wholesome, and sure to interest boys." — 
M. H. B. Mussey. 
Ewing Jacaknapes, illustrations by Calde- 

cott, Altemus; Dutton 
La Motte Fouque Undine, Rackham illustrations, 

Doubleday 
Sintram and His Companions, 
Lippincott 



3 82 



READING AND LITERATURE 



Edward W. Frantz 



Uncle Zeb and His Friends, Atlantic 

Monthly Press 
Tales from the Secret Kingdom, Yale 

Press, illustrated by silhouettes 
The Bab Ballads, Macmillan 
Dutch Fairy Tales, Crowell 
The Boy's Parkman; Little, Brown 
Katrinka, The Story of a Russian 
Child, Dutton. In the "Little 
Schoolmate" Series 
Sandman Stories, Page 
The Flight of Pony Baker, Harper 
Little Boy Lost, Knopf 
The Green Willow and other Japanese 
Fairy Tales, illustrated by Gobel, 
Macmillan 
Wigwam Stories, Ginn 
Red, Blue, Green Fairy Books 
Book of Romance, Longmans 
Donegal Fairy Stories 
In Chimney Corners, Doubleday 
Here and Now Story Book, Dutton 
192 1. Illustrations by Van Loon 
Anne of Green Gables, Page 
Lost Indian Magic, Stokes 
"A new mystery story that will interest Camp Fire Girls and Boy 
Scouts alike. The plot is based on an Indian legend, giving chance 
for true portrayal of early Indian customs." — Stevens. 
F. J. Olcott Bible Stories to Read and Tell 

Old Testament Stories in Bible 
Language, Pogany illustrations, 
Houghton 
Olcott and Pendleton The Jolly Book for Boys and Girls, 

Houghton 
James Otis Toby Tyler, Harper 

"Everyone loves a circus. This story is a favorite with boys and 
girls because it shows the inside life of acrobats and clowns along 
with the experiences of Toby and Mr. Stubbs, the monkey." — 
Stevens. 
Lucy Fitch Perkins Cornelia, Houghton 

"A heroine as interesting as Emmy Lou." — Stevens. 
Norman H. Pitman A Chinese Wonder Book, Dutton 

"All varieties of Chinese folklore appear in this translation. Like 
many other new books for children this has illustrations by a native 
artist." — Stevens. 



Ethel M. Gate 

W. S. Gilbert 
William Elliot Griffis 
Louise S. Hasbrouck 
Helen E. Haskell 



William J. Hopkins 
William Dean Howells 
W. H. Hudson 
Grace James 



Mary C. Judd 
Andrew Lang 

Seumas MacManus 

Lucy Sprague Mitchell 

Montgomery 

Grace and Carl Moon 



APPENDIX 



383 



Howard Pyle Story of King Arthur and his Knights 

Story of the Champions of the Round 

Table 
Otto of the Silver Hand, Scribner 
Men of Iron, Harper 
Arthur Rackham, Illustrator Some British Ballads, Dodd 

Of course, most excellent fantastic pictures. 
Laura E. Richards 



Captain January 
Queen Hildegarde, Estes 
Children of the Tenements, Macmillan 
The King of the Golden River, 

Lippincott 
Sinopah, the Indian Boy, E. Boyd 

Smith illustrations, Houghton 
Rising Wolf, the White Blackfoot 
Lone Bull's Mistake, Houghton 
Spanish Fairy Book, Stokes 
Emmeline, Houghton 
Good Old Stories for Boys and Girls, 
Lothrop 

"A new one-volume library for children of from ten to fourteen 

years. ' ' — Stevens. 

Dickens' Children, Scribner 



Jacob Riis 
Ruskin 

James W. Schultz 



Gertrudis Segovia 
Elsie Singmaster 
Elva S. Smith 



Jessie Wilcox Smith 
Pleasant pictures. 
Johanna Spyri 



Flora Annie Steel 

Burton Stevenson 

Harriet Beecher Stowe 
Thackeray 



Thompson-Seton 



Mark Twain 



Jules Verne 



Carolyn Wells 



"A good girl's story." — F. T, 



Heidi 

Moni, the Goat Boy, Ginn ; Dutton ; 

Lippincott 
English Fairy Tales, Rackham illus- 
trations. Macmillan 
Young Train Dispatcher 
Young Section Hand, Page 
Uncle Tom's Cabin, Burt; Dutton 
Ballads and Songs, Brock illustra- 
tions, Putnam. Author's illustra- 
tions, John Murray or Smith and 
Elden, London 
Biography of a Grizzly, Century 
Wild Animals I have Known 
Lives of the Hunted, Scribner 
The Jumping Frog of Calavtras 

County, Harper 
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea 
Mysterious Island, Burt; Dutton 
Around the World in Eighty Days, 

Dutton 
In the Reign of Queen Dick, Appleton 
Patty Fairfield, Dodd 
Baker. 



384 READING AND LITERATURE 

Kate Douglas Wiggin The Birds Christmas Carol 

Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, 
Houghton; Grossett 
Oscar Wilde The Young King and the Star Child, 

Mosher 
The Happy Prince, Brentano 
Mary E. Wilkins The Pot of Gold, including the Bound 

Girl, Lothrop 
"A collection of clever stories for bright children." — F. T. Baker. 
Williston Japanese Fairy Tales, Rand, 2 

volumes 
Illustrations by a Japanese artist. 
Howard Driggs, Editor "Uncle Nick" Wilson, the Indian 

White Boy, World Book Co. 
J. D. Wyss The Swiss Family Robinson, W. D. 

Ho wells introduction, Rhead il- 
lustrations, Harper 

3. VARIED EXPLORATIONS AND ACTIVITIES 

Jacob Abbott Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots 

Alfred the Great, Burt; Harper 
Chari.es F. Allen David Crockett, Scout, Lippincott 

"A boy's book about a real pioneer American." — Stevens. 
James Baldwin Abraham Lincoln 

The American Book of Golden Deeds, 
American Book Co. 
"Stories about both famous and obscure heroes; of interest to boys 
and girls as well." — Stevens. 
Dan Beard American Boy's Book of Wild 

Animals, Lippincott 
H. H. Boyesen Modern Vikings 

Boyhood in Norway, Scribner 
Frank C. Bostock Training of Wild Animals, Century 

Floyd Bralliar Knowing Insects Through Stories, 

Funk Wagnalls 
Dorothy Canfield and Others What Shall We Do Now? Stokes 

Games and activities of all sorts. 
Bullard Tad and His Father, Little, Brown 

A story of Lincoln and his Boys. 
T. W. Burgess Burgess Bird Book for Children 

Burgess Animal Book for Children 
Louis Aggasiz Fuertes illustrations, Little, Brown. 
Paul du Chaillu Land of the Long Night, Scribner 

Stories of the Gorilla Country 
My Apingi Kingdom 
Country of the Dwarfs, Harper 



APPENDIX 385 

Graves Glenwood Clark Tiny Toilers and their Works, 

Century 
"Shows our insect neighbors and their habits in so absorbing a 
manner that it will delight not only the young naturalist but fireside 
and schoolroom as well." — M. H. B. M. 
Fab re The Story Book of Science, Century 

Illustrated by Florence Bicknell 
Insect Adventures 
Louise S. Hasbrouck translation, Goldberg illustrations, Dodd. 
H.W.Ferguson Child's Book of the Teeth, World 

Book Co. 
Lena M. Franck Working My Way Around the 

World, Century 
Elizabeth W. Grierson The Children's Book of Edinburgh, 

Scotland (In "Peeps at Many 
Lands" Series), Macmillan 
"Fact that delights quite as much as fiction, regarding one of the 
most romantic cities of the world." — Stevens. 
Hall am Hawksworth The Strange Adventures of a Pebble, 

Scribner 
"Crowns geography and makes geology a member of the family 
circle . . . Each informal chapter ... is supplemented by a clever 
page called Hide-and-Seek in the Library, which induces the child 
to dip eagerly into those books whose titles are apt to be enbalmed 
under the forbidding heading Bibliography." — M. H. B. M. 
Frances Jewett Good Health, Ginn 

In the Gulick Hygiene Series. 
Johnson Famous Adventures and Prison 

Escapes of the Civil War, Century 
Henry Lanier Book of Bravery — Books, I, II and 

III, Scribner 
Maeterlinck Children's Life of the Bee, illustrated, 

Dodd 
Olive Thorne Miller First and Second Book of Birds, 

color illustrations, Houghton 
Boutet de Mouvel Jeanne d'Arc, Century 

Illustrated by the author. 
Helen Nicola y Boy's Life of Abraham Lincoln, 

Century 
"The best life of Lincoln for young people." — A. L. A. 
Pittenger The Great Locomotive Chase, Penn 

Arthur Quiller-Couch Roll Call of Honor, Sully 

Laura Richards Florence Nightingale, The Angel of 

the Crimea, Appleton 
David Eugene Smith Number Stories of Long Ago, Ginn 

25 



3 86 READING AND LITERATURE 

Horace E. Scudder George Washington, Houghton 

"One of the best single-volume lives of Washington, in language 
suited to younger readers." — Stevens. 
Bayard Taylor Boys of Other Countries, Putnam 

Hendrick Van Loon Ancient Man, Boni 

Short History of Discovery, illus- 
trated by the author, McKay 
Lillian McLean Waldo Stories of Luther Burbank and his 

Plant School, Scribner 
Olive Browne Horne Stories of Great Artists, American 

and Katherine L. Scobey Book Co. 

Very simple; good to put into the hands of grade children, from 
the third up. 

HOME MAKING FOR LITTLE GIRLS 1 
Longmans Household Science Readers, Longmans 
Foster Housekeeping for Little Girls, Duffield 

Hed wig Levi Work and Play for Little Girls, 

Duffield 
Foster Serving for Little Girls, Duffield 

E. D. Yale When Mother Lets us Give a Party, 

Moffat 
C. Johnson When Mother Lets Us Help, Moffat 

Johnson When Mother Lets Us Cook, Moffat 

Bach When Mother Lets Us Make Candy, 

'Moffat 
Kinne and Cooley The Home and the Family 

Food and Health, Macmillan 

C. JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL (SEVENTH THROUGH NINTH) 
CHILDREN ABOUT 11-16 YEARS 

1. A LIST OF FUNDAMENTALS FROM WHICH CLASS 
READINGS WILL OFTENEST BE SELECTED 

Grades (7-9) are indicated for a suggested standard reading require- 
ment for each grade. 

The Old Testament (8 or 9), "the chief narrative episodes in Genesis, 
Exodus, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Daniel, and the books of Ruth and 
Esther." Moulton (Macmillan) and Nettleton (Holt) editions are 
recommended. The latter is in the words of the King James version. 

Greek and Norse Myths (9) Editions: Buckley, The Children of 
Dawn, Stokes. Bulfinch, The Age of Fable, Crowell; Everyman's, 
Dutton. Guerber, Myths of Greece and Rome; Book of the Epic, 
Lippincott. Gayley, Classic Myths, Ginn. Quiller-Couch, Ever- 
green Stories, Dutton. Hutchinson, The Muses' Pageant I-III, 
Dutton, Everyman's. Jessie Tattock, Greek and Roman Mythology, 
Century. 

*By courtesy of Professor Bernice Dodge of the University of Wisconsin. 



APPENDIX 



387 



Epics 

Homer (9) The Odyssey. Palmer's translation 

is recommended (Houghton); it 
may well be compared with a good 
verse rendering; at least books 
7-22 
The Iliad, Bryant's translation, 
Houghton; at least Books IV, VI, 
XXII and XXIV 
The Aeneid, Virgil — Books I- VI 
Williams' translation, Houghton 
Midsummer Night's Dream, L. P. 
Perkins illustrations, Stokes; 
Rackham illustrations, Hodder 
and Stoughton 
Julius Ccesar, Rackham illustra- 
tions, Doubleday 
For both see also Rich's edition, Harper. 
Tales and Novels 
Cervantes Don Quixote 

F. A. Parry retelling, Crane illustrations, Lane; Rich adaption, 
Derrick illustrations, Small, Maynard. 



Virgil 



Shakespeare (9) 



Cooper 



Dickens (9 or 10) 



Eliot (9 or 10) 

Hale (8) 
Hawthorne (7) 

Irving (8) 



Deerslayer, Macmillan 

(9) Last of the Mohicans, E. Boyd 
Smith illustrations, Holt ; Wyeth 
illustrations, Scribner 

A Tale of Two Cities, "Phiz" illus- 
trations, Scribner 

(8) Christmas Books, Brock illustra- 
tions, Dutton; Everyman's 

Silas Marner, Thomson illustrations, 
Macmillan 

Man Without a Country, Century 

The Great Stone Face 

Feathertop 

The Sketch Book, Boughton illus- 
trations 

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow 

Rip Van Winkle, Rackham illustra- 
tions, Macmillan; Cecil Aldin 
illustrations, Doubleday 

Christmas Sketches, Caldecott illus- 
trations, Macmillan. Cecil Aldin 
illustrations, Doran 

Knickerbocker Stories from Irving, 
Scribner 



388 



READING AND LITERATURE 



KlNGSLEY 

Kipling (8) 
Poe 

Scott 



Westward Hoi Macmillan Pocket 
Classics, abridged; Wyeth illus- 
trations, Scribner 

Captains Courageous, Century 

The Pit and the Pendulum 

The Gold Bug 

The Cask of Amontillado, Putnam 

(9-10) Ivanhoe, Greifenhagen illus- 
trations, Lippincott; Boyd Smith 
illustrations, Houghton 

Quentin Durward, Oxford 

(9) The Lady of the Lake, Burt; 
Scribner; Holt 

The Lay of the Last Minstrel, 
Macmillan; Scott, Foresman 

Treasure Island, Paget illustrations, 
Scribner; Louis Rhead illustra- 
tions, Harper 

Gulliver's Travels, Rhead illustra- 
tions, Harper; Rackham illus- 
trations, Dent, London; Colum, 
editor, Pogany illustrator, 
Macmillan 

Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc 
Tom Sawyer 

(7) Huckleberry Finn, Harper, 
(School Editions) 

Narrative and Other Poems 

George Teter, Editor (8-9) One Hundred Narrative Poems, 

Scott, Foresman 
(8-9) English and Scottish Ballads, 
Witham & Neilson, Katherine 
Lee Bates, Allingham, Stempel, 
Quiller-Couch, or Gummere 
editions 
See Rackham's illustrations in Some British Ballads. See the ballad 
bibliography for Chapter VIII, pp. 363 ff. 

Emilie Kipp Baker Children's Tliird Book of Poetry, 

American Book Co. 



Stevenson (7) 
Swift (7) 

Mark Twain 



Lowell (7) 



Vision of Sir Launfal, Putnam 



r 



APPENDIX 



389 



Longfellow (7) 



Tales of a Wayside Inn 
Birds of Killingworth 
King Robert of Sicily 
Saga of King Olaf 
Paul Revere 7 s Ride 
Wreck of the Hesperus 
(7) Miles Standish 
Skeleton in Armor 
Hiawatha, Houghton 
Herve Riel 

How They Brought the Good News 
Incident of the French Camp 
Sohrab and Rustum, Macmillan 
Horatius, in Lays of Ancient Rome, 

Macmillan 
Snowbound 
The Gift of Tritemius 
Skipper Treson's Ride 
Abraham Davenport, Houghton 
Return of the Witches, or the Broom- 
stick Train 
The Deacon's Masterpiece, or the 

Wonderful One-Horse Shay 
Old Ironsides, Houghton; Grossett; 

Macmillan 
Lord Ullin's Daughter 
Lucy Gray 

The Highwayman, Ditson; Stokes 
The Oregon Trail, Remington illus- 
trations, Little, Brown; Ginn 
Gettysburg Address 
Second Inaugural 

Letter to Mrs. Bixby, etc., Every- 
man's Library; Dutton; Scott, 
Foresman; Lippincott, etc. 
Boy's King Arthur, N. C. Wyeth 

illustrations, Scribner 
King Arthur Stories from Malory. 
Houghton 

2. SUPPLEMENTARY READINGS 
OTHER POETRY 
HansAanrud Lisbeth Longfrock, Ginn 

"This attractive little narrative gives a picture of Home Life on a 
Norwegian farm." — Stevens. 



Browning (8) 



Arnold (9) 
Macaulay (9) 

Whittier (8) 



Holmes (8) 



Campbell 
Wordsworth (8) 
Noyes (8) 
Parkman 

Lincoln (7) 



Sidney Lanier (7) 
Stevens and Allen (7) 



39° 



READING AND LITERATURE 



Alcott Little Women, and others, Little, 

Brown, Jessie W. Smith illustra- 
tions, or Alice Barbour Stephens 
illustrations 
Thomas Bailey Aldrich Story of a Bad Boy, Houghton 

Story of a Cat, from the French of 
Bedolliere, Houghton 
Illustrated by comical silhouettes. 
Mary R. S. Andrews Bob and the Guides 

The Perfect Tribute, Scribner 
Margaret Ashmum Isabel Carleton's Year, Macmillan 

Eleanor Atkinson Johnny Appleseed, Harper 

"The romantic tale of a traveling benefactor of our country who 
dispensed apple seeds through several states and thus greatly en- 
larged the fruit crop of later generations." — Stevens. 



Mary Austin 
Bacon 

Amelia Barr 
John Bennett 
Russell Bond 
Noah Brooks 

Well illustrated. 
John Brown 
Thomas Bulfinch 
Bullen 

Mary Catherwood 
Percival Chubb 

Churchill 

Lisi Cipriana 

Connolly 

Frederic Taber Cooper 

Dana 

Darton 

Charles Dickens 



The Trail Book, Houghton 

The Madness of Phillip and Other 

Stories, Doubleday 
A Bow of Orange Ribbon, Dodd 
Master Skylark, Century 
With the Men Who Do Things, Munn 
The Boy Emigrants, Scribner 

Rab and his Friends, Dodge 

Age of Chivalry, Crowell 

Cruise of the Cachalot 

The Romance of Lollard, Century 

Travels at Home from Mark Twain, 

Scribner 
The Crisis, Macmillan Pocket 

Classics 
A Tuscan Childhood, Century 
Out of Gloucester, Scribner 
An Argosy of Fables, Stokes 
Two Years Before the Mast, Pears 

illustrations, Macmillan 
Tales of the Canterbury Pilgrims, 

Thomson, illustrator, Stokes 
Lavid Copperfield, Burt; Reynolds 
illustrations, Hodder and 
Stoughton, London; Dodd 
Pickwick Papers, Macmillan,' 'Phiz" 
illustrations, Scribner, Jacobs 
Aldin illustrations (2 volumes), 
Dutton 
Oliver Twist, Dutton 



APPENDIX 391 

Beulah M. Dix Soldier Rigdale 

Merrylips 

Blithe McBride, Macmillan 
Arthur Conan Doyle Micah Clarke, Longmans (School 

edition — abridged) 
"A historical novel with a fine figure as its hero. The events lie in 
the England of Charles II and include the Battle of Sedgemoor. " — ■ 
Stevens. 
Edward Eggleston The Hoosier Schoolmaster, Grossett 

Dorothy Canfield Fisher Understood Betsy, Holt 

A remarkably good girl's book. 
Lady Gregory Cuchulain of Muirthemne, Murray, 

London; Scribner 
An Irish heroic story, excellently told. 
Beth B. Gilchrist Kit, Pat, and a Few Boys, Century 

"A wholesome story of the best sort of camp life. " — M. H. B. M. 
Willard Grenfell Adrift on an Icepan, Houghton 

Grierson Tales from the Scottish Ballads, 

Macmillan 
Grinnell Blackfoot Lodge Stories 

Pawnee Hero Stories, Scribner 
Marion Harland When Grandmamma was New, 

Lothrop 
Haskell Katrinka, The Story of a Russian 

Child, Dutton 
In the "Little Schoolmate Series. " 
Hawthorne Grandfather's Chair, Burt 

The Great Stone Face, Crane > 
Wonder Book, and Tanglewood 
Tales, Parrish illustrations, 
Duffield 
Henley Lyra Heroica, Scribner 

Thomas Hughes Tom Brown's School Days, Sullivan 

illustrations, Macmillan; Rhead 
illustrations, Harper 
Laurence Hutton A Boy I Knew and Four Dogs, 

Harper 
Irving Tales from the Alhambra, Brock 

illustrations, Houghton 
Jewett Betty Leicester, Houghton 

Owen Johnson The Varmint 

The Tennessee Shad, Baker; 

Little 
Stover at Yale, Stokes 
Elijah Kellogg Elm Island Stories, Lothrop 

"Too good to be neglected — full of wholesome action and feeling." 
— F. F. Baker. 



392 READING AND LITERATURE 

Kipling Rewards and Fairies 

Puck of Pook's Hill, Rackham 

illustrations, Doubleday 
Collected Verse, inclusive edition, 
Doubleday 
Sidney Lanier Boy's Froissart 

Boy's Mabinogion, Scribner 
Song of the Chattahoochee, in 

Poems 
Boy's Percy — Selections from 
Percy's Reliques, Scribner 
Jack London Call of the Wild 

White Fang 

Love of Life, Macmillan 
E. V. Lucas Book of Verses for Children, 

Macmillan 
"The compiler has carefully chosen some two hundred titles from 
the work of such poets as Burns, Lewis Carroll, Longfellow, Riley, 
and Stevenson." — Stevens. 
E. V. Lucas Old- Fashioned Tales, Stokes 

Lytton Last Days of Pompeii, Dutton 

Harold, the Last of the Saxon Kings 
Cyrus Macmillan Canadian Wonder Tales, Lane 

Maurice Maeterlinck The Blue Bird, Dodd 

Marryat Mr. Midshipman Easy, Macmillan 

"The author was a sea rover for twenty-five years. Out of his ex- 
periences came this narrative of stirring adventures, full of rare 
humor. The hero gets into many absurd situations through his 
bumptious refusals to submit to naval discipline. " — Stevens. 
George Madden Martin Emmy Lou, Her Book and Heart, 

Doubleday 
Harriet Martineau The Peasant and the Prince, 

Houghton 
John Masefield Jim Davis, Stokes; Grossett 

Martin Hyde, the Duke's Messenger, 
Little 
Brander Matthews Tom Paulding, Grossett 

Herman Melville Typee, Abridgment — Harcourt 

Edward Mims The Van Dyke Book, Scribner 

S. Weir Mitchell Adventures of Francois, Century 

John Muir Stickeen, Houghton 

One of the best dog stories ever written. 
Kathleen Norris Mother, Macmillan 

Noyes Avenue of the Allies, Ballads of the 

Trawling Fleet, in Collected 
Poems, Vol. Ill, Stokes 
Harvey O'Higgins The Smoke-Eaters, Century 



APPENDIX 393 

Ollivant Bob, Son of Battle, Doubleday 

Porter The Scottish Chiefs, Crowell; 

Wyeth illustrations, Scribner 
Said by Scott to have been his stimulus to romance. 
Quiller-Couch The Delectable Duchy 

The Splendid Spur, Scribner 
Charles Reads Cloister and Hearth, Scott 

Jacob Riis Hero Tales from the Far North, 

Macmillan 
C. G. D. Roberts Watchers of the Trail, Page 

Haunters of the Silence, Page 
Kings in Exile, Macmillan 
Scott The Talisman, Lippincott 

Tales of a Grandfather, Ginn; 

Putnam 
Wandering Willie's Tale, in Red- 
gauntlet 
Seaman Jacqueline of the Carrier Pigeons, 

Sturgis & Walton 
Sienkiewicz In Desert and Wilderness, Little 

Edward Rowland Sill Opportunity 

The Fool's Prayer, in Poems, 
Houghton 
William Gilmore Simms The Yemassee, B. F. Johnson, 

Newson 
' ' An Indian story. Full of action. ' ' — F. T. Baker. 
Singmaster Emmeline 

When Sarah Saved the Day, 
Houghton 

R. L. Stevenson Black Arrow 

Kidnapped, Scribner 

Stoddard Little Smoke, Appleton 

Stowe Uncle Tom's Cabin, Dutton 

Alan Sullivan Brother Eskimo, Century 

' ' This story of two Eskimo lads left to their own devices by the part- 
ing of the ice, is rich with Northern lore, is conceived in a fine spirit, 
and told with pleasant humor. " — M. H. B. M. 

Booth Tarkington Penrod, Doubleday 

Herminie Templeton Darby O'Gill and the Good People, 

Doubleday 
Albert P. Terhune Lad: A Dog, Dutton 

H. A. Vachell The Hill, Dodd 

"If you have read and like Tom Brown's School Days, you will like 
this book." — Ninth-grade Boy. 



394 



READING AND LITERATURE 



Henry Van Dyke 

Lew Wallace 

Stewart Edward White 



Yonge 



Guilelma Zollinger 



The First Christmas Tree, Scribner 
Story of the Other Wise Man, Harper 
Ben Hur, Harper 
Gold 

Riverman Stories, Doubleday 
Ths Magic Forest, Macmillan 
The Armorer's Apprentice, Mac- 
millan 
The Dove in the Eagle's Nest, Dutton 
Widow 0' Callaghan' s Boys 
Florence Scoville Shinn illustra- 
tions, McClurg 



PLAYS 

Peter Pan, Scribner 
The Little King, Kennedy 
Three Pills in a Bottle, in Plays of 
the 47 Workshop, First Series, 
Brentano 
Master Will of Stratford, Macmillan 
The Jackdaw, in Seven Short Plays 
The Golden Apple, Putnam 
Glory of the Morning, in Wisconsin 

Plays, First Series, Brentano 
The Wolf of Gubbio, Houghton 
The Woodland Princess 
The Knave of Hearts, Scribner 
play on the nursery rhyme, 
in Atlantic Book of Modern Plays. 

Six Who Pass While the Lentils 
Boil, Nevertheless; In Portman- 
teau Plays, Stewart & Kidd 
A Treasury of Plays for Children, 
Sarg illustrations, Little 

BIOGRAPHY, HISTORY, TRAVEL 
Marietta Ambrosi When I was a Girl in Italy, Lothrop 

One of an interesting series with similar titles. 
Roy C. Andrews Whale Hunting with Gun and Camera, 

Appleton 
MaryAntin At School in the Promised Land, 

Houghton 
Holmfridr Arnadottir When I was a Girl in Iceland, Lothrop 

A. F. Arnold The Sea Beach at Ebb Tide, Century 

E. M. Bacon The Boy's HaMuyt, Scribner 

Barnes Yankee Ships and Yankee Sailors, 

Grossett 



Barrie 

Witter Bynner 
Rachel Lyman Field 



Louise Ayers Garnett 
Lady Gregory 

W. E. Leonard 

Josephine Preston Peabody 
Louise Saunders 

A charming marionette 
Parrish illustrations; also 
Stuart Walker 



Montrose Moses 



APPENDIX 395 

J. N. Baskett and R. L. The Story of the Amphibians and 

Dittmars Reptiles, Appleton 

"Illustrations in color; very interesting. " — F. T. Baker. 
Katherine Lee Bates In Sunny Spain, Dutton 

In the "Little Schoolmate" series. 
Farnham Bishop Story of the Submarine, Century 

F. O. Butler Story of Paper Making, J. W. Butler 

Paper Co., Chicago 
George Catlin The Boy's Catlin, Scribner 

"A famous record of facts reading like romance. It is a standard 
work on Indian life and customs, here condensed and rearranged 
for boys. " — Stevens. 
Padraic Colum A Boy in Eirinn, Dutton 

In the "Little Schoolmate" series. 
Irving Crump Boy's Book of Firemen 

Boy's Book of Policemen, Dodd 
E. C. Davies A Boy in Servia, Crowell 

R. H. Davis Real Soldiers of Fortune, Scribner 

Norman Duncan Dr. Grenfell's Parish 

Dr. Luke of the Labrador, Revell 
W. A. DePuy Uncle Sam's Modern Miracles, Stokes 

Eastman From Deep Woods to Civilization, 

Little 
Indian Boyhood, Grossett 
Hamlin Garland Boy Life on the Prairie, Harper 

W. P. Garrison What Darwin Saw, Harper 

"Short sketches about animals, strange countries and strange 
people, compiled from various sources. " — F. T. Baker. 
Griffis Young Folks' History of Holland, 

Houghton 
Brave Little Holland and What She 
has Taught Us, Houghton 
Herman Hagedorn Boy's Life of Roosevelt, Harper 

Illustrated with cartoons, photographs, and diary extracts. 
E. E. Hale Stories of Adventure Told by Adven- 

turers 
Stories of Discovery Told by Discov- 
erers, Little 
Hutchins Hapgood Paul Jones, Houghton 

"The life of a sea hero put into words by a master of expository 
writing. ' ' — Stevens. 
George Inness Hartley ! The Boy Hunters in Demerara, 

Century 
"Implants a hope in the reader's breast that sometime he may 
paddle a dugout with William Beebe. In the meantime the boy 
will carry this book in his pocket as an interpreter of the jungle 
exhibits at Zoo and Museum. " — M. H. B. M. 



3 p6 READING AND LITERATURE 

F. T. Hill On the Trail of Washington 

On the Trail of Grant and Lee t 
Appleton 
Thomas Hughes Life of David Livingstone, Burt; 

Macmillan 
"This story of a great religious adventurer has the charm of fiction. " 
— Stevens. 
Tudor Jenks Boy's Book of Explorations, 

Doubled ay 
Robert Jonckheere WhenIwasaBoyinBelgium,hothTOp 

Helen Keller The Story of My Life, Houghton, 

School edition 
H. A. Kelly Walter Reed and the Yellow Fever, 

Medical Standard Book Co. 
John Kenlon Fires and Fire Fighters, Doran 

"A history of modern fire-fighting with a review of its develop- 
ment from earliest times. The author is Chief of the New York 
Fire Department." — Eaton. 
George Kennan Tent Life in Siberia, Putnam 

A Russian Comedy of Errors, 
Century 
Andrew Lang Maid of France, Longmans 

Louise Lamprey In the Days of the Guild, Stokes 

Yan Phou Lee When I was a Boy in China, Lothrop 

Charles I. Lummis Some Strange Corners of our Country 

Man who Married the Moon and 
Other Pueblo Folk-Tales, Century 
H. C. McCook Nature's Craftsmen, Harper 

Kelvin McKready Beginner's Star Book, Putnam 

Beautiful plates. 
Mahaffy Old Greek Life, American Book Co. 

Nanine Meiklejohn The Cart of Many Colors, Dutton 

In the "Little Schoolmate" series. This one is well introduced. 
Enos Mills The Story of a Thousand-Year 

Pine and Other Tales of Wild 
Life, Houghton 
Vladimir de Bogory When I Was a Boy in Russia, 

Mokrievitch Lothrop 

Excellent account of life on estates and at school, and of early 
revolutionary activities and exile. 
James Morgan Abraham Lincoln, the Boy and the 

Man, Macmillan 
Motley The Siege of Ley den, Heath 

John Muir The Boyhood of a Naturalist, 

Houghton 
Selections from "Story of My Boyhood and Youth." 



APPENDIX 397 

H. E. Marshall English Literature for Boys and Girls, 

Stokes 
Attractively illustrated; in story form, good for selective reading by 
the teacher. 
James Otis The Life Savers 

The Light Keepers, Dutton 
Overton Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, 

Scribner 
R. D. Paine Ships and Sailors of Old Salem, 

McClurg 
Paine Boy's Life of Mark Twain, Harper 

Mary R. Parkman Conquests of Invention, Century 

"The sketches of the inventors' lives are written and not compiled; 
the diagrams and descriptions are easily understood, and many a 
boy will find the volume an incentive to ingenuity as well as a 
reliable book of reference. " — M. H. B. M. 
Gifford Pinchot A Primer of Forestry, United States 

Department of Agriculture 
Della R. Prescott A Day in a Colonial Home, Edited 

by John Cotton Dana. Marshall 
Jones, Boston 
Interestingly illustrated. 
Raphael Pumpelly Travels and Adventures, Edited by 

O. S. Rice, Holt 
Frederic Remington The Way of an Indian, Duffield 

"The work of a splendid outdoor artist who specialized on Western 
subjects, such as Indians, horses and cowboys." — Stevens. 
Theodore Roosevelt Letters to His Children (Bishop, 

editor), Scribner; illustrated 
by the author's "stone-age 
drawings" 
L. W. Schultz My Life as an Indian, Houghton 

George Bird Grinnell introduction; illustrations from photographs. 
Shumway A Day in Ancient Rome, Heath 

Captain Joshua Slocum Around the World in the Sloop 

Spray, Scribner 
Henry M. Stanley My Black Companions and Their 

Strange Stories, Scribner 
Stockton Buccaneers and Pirates of Our Coast, 

Macmillan 
Hudson Stuck Ten Thousand Miles in a Dog Sled, 

Scribner 
Eva March Tappan In the Days of Alfred the Great 

In the Days of Queen Elizabeth, 

Lothrop 
When Knights were Bold, 
Houghton 



398 



READING AND LITERATURE 



R. G. Thwaites Daniel Boone 

Father Marquette, Appleton 
Down Historic Waterways, McClurg 
Mark Twain Personal Recollections of Joan of 

Arc, Harper 
Jules Verne Great Navigators, Scribner 

Explorers of the Nineteenth Century, 
Scribner 
Wallace Lure of the Labrador Wild, Revell 

Whitham Shepherd of the Ocean, Stokes 

John S. White Plutarch for Boys and Girls, 

Stokes; Putnam 

3. " SUBJECT MATTER BOOKS " 

WHAT AND HOW TO DO BOOKS 

J. H. Adams Harper's Machinery Book for Boys, 

Harper 
Dan C. Beard The American Boys' Handy Book 

Shelters, Shacks and Shanties 
Jack of all Trades, Scribner 
Lina and A. B. Beard On the Trail, Scribner 

For girls — how to prepare for camping and hiking. 
A. Russell Bond The Scientific American Boy, 

Munn 
Walter Camp Athletes All — Training, Organiza- 

tion and Play, Scribner 
Handbook of Health, Appleton 
A. A. Carey The Scout Law in Practice, Little, 

Brown 
Boy Scouts of America, Handbook for Boys, Boy Scouts of America, 

New York. 
Book of the Campfire Girls, Official Handbook, Campfire Outfitting Co., 

17 West 17th Street, New York. 
Scouting for Girls, Official Handbook, Girl Scouts Inc., 189 Lexington 
Ave., New York City. 



Edward Cave 



A. F. Collins 



F. A. Collins 

C. A. Eastman 
Grinnell and Swan 

A. N. Hall 
E. S. Keene 



The Boy Scouts' Camp Book, 

Doubleday 
The Book of Wireless 
Book of Electricity 
Book of Magic, Appleton 
Boys' Book of Model Aeroplanes, 

Century 
Indian Scout Talks, Little, Brown 
Harper's Camping and Scouting, 

Harper 
The Boy Craftsman, Lothrop 
Mechanics of the Household, 

McGraw 



APPENDIX 



399 



C. B. Kelland The American Boys 1 Workshop, 

McKay 
Horace Kephart Camping and Woodcraft, Outing 

Publishing Co. 
Warren H. Miller Campcraft, Scribner 

The Tony Sarg Marionette Book, Huebsch 

How to make puppets and put on puppet shows; illustrated by 

Mr. Sarg. 
A. H. Verrill Boy Collector's Handbook, McBride 

De Forest and Caffin A Short History of Art, Prang Co. 

Charles Barstow Famous Pictures, Century 

M. S. Emery How to Enjoy Pictures, Prang Co. 

The best available bibliographies in social studies and civics are to 
be found in H. C. Hill's Community Life and Civic Problems 
(Ginn, 1921); the readings found best in actual classroom 
use of the lists have been starred. Most valuable are the Les- 
sons in Community and National Life, Series A, B, and C, ed- 
ited by Judd and Marshall and sold by the Superintendent 
of Documents, Washington, D. C. (55 j£). 



BOOKS IN GEOGRAPHY l 



Nellie B. Allen 

Isaiah Bowman 
A. P. Brigham 

E. C. Brooks 
Bengtson and Griffith 
Forrest Crissey 

R. E. Dodge 

Elizabeth Fisher 

F. D. & A. J. Herbertson 

C. W. HOTCHKISS 

E. Huntington 
E. R. Johnson 
Willis E. Johnson 
E. A. Martin 
C. A. McMurry 



Geographical and Industrial Studies, 

United States, Asia, Europe, 

South America, Ginn 
South America, Rand, McNally 
From Trail to Railway Through the 

Appalachians, Ginn 
The Story of Cotton, Rand, McNally 
The Wheat Industry, Macmillan 
The Story of Foods, Rand, McNally 
A Reader in Physical Geography, 

Longmans 
Resources and Industries of the 

United States, Ginn 
Geography of Africa from Original 

Sources, Macmillan 
Representative Cities of the U. S., 

Houghton 
Asia, Rand, McNally 
Elements of Transportation, Appleton 
Mathematical Geography, American 
Story of a Piece of Coal, Appleton 
Larger Type Studies of American 

Geography, Macmillan 



* Made out under the direction of Professor R. H. Whitbeck, Univ. of Wisconsin. 



400 



READING AND LITERATURE 



J. C. Mills 

Sir John Murray 
J. M. Oaxley 
L. V. Pirsson 
J. R. Smith 
G. T. Surface 
Holland Thompson 

W. S. Tower 
Cy. Warman 



ts on Some American 

Industries, McClurg 
The Ocean, Holt 
Romance of Commerce, Crowell 
Rocks and Rock Minerals, Wiley 
The Story of Iron and Steel, Appleton 
The Story of Sugar, Appleton 
From Cotton Field to Cotton Mill, 

Macmillan 
The Story of Oil, Appleton 
The Story of the Railroad, Appleton 



GENERAL SCIENCE READINGS 



Joseph H. Adams 

Alphonse Berget 

Rudolph Bodmer 

Sarah K. Bolton 
Alexander R. Bond 
Elmer E. Burns 
John Burroughs 

Frank G. Carpenter 

A. Frederick Collins 
Francis A. Collins 
AnnaB. Comstock 
John H. and Anna B. Comstock 

Herbert W. Conn 

T. W. Corbin 

Ernest A. Dench 
Royal Dixon 
Russell Doubleday 
Jean H. C. Fabre 

Samuel E. Forman 



Harper's Machinery Book for Boys, 

Harper 
The Earth, Its Life and Death, 

Putnam 
The Book of Wonders, R. J. Bodmer, 

Washington, D. C; Caspar 
Famous Men of Science, Crowell 
With the Men Who do Things, Munn 
Story of Great Inventions, Harper 
Squirrels and Other Fur Bearers, 

Houghton 
How the World is Clothed 
How the World is Fed, American 
How to Fly, Appleton 
The Camera Man, Century 
Ways of the Sixfooted, Ginn 
How to Know the Butterflies, 

Appleton 
Bacteria, Yeasts and Molds, Ginn 
Story of Germ Life, Appleton 
Romance of Submarine Engineering, 

Seeley, London; Lippincott 
Making the Movies, Macmillan 
The Human Side of Animals, Stokes 
Stories of Inventors, Doubleday 
Life of the Caterpillar, Dodd 
Life of the Fly 
Life of the Spider, Dodd 
Stories of Useful Inventions, 

Century 



i Prepared by Mr. E. R. Glenn, of the Lincoln School of Teachers College, 
Columbia University, and used by his courtesy. 



APPENDIX 



401 



E. E. FOURNIER 

Charles R. Gibson 



Alice B. Gould 
E. S. Grew 
Francis H. Herrick 
W. H. Hobbs 
Rupert S. Holland 
Woods Hutchinson 
George Iles 
Bernard E. Jones 

Francis A. Jones 
Harriet L. Keeler 
William A. Lacy 

E. R. Lankester 
Maurice Maeterlinck 
Geoffrey Martin 

John Muir 

Mary R. Parkman 
Overton W. Price 

George R. Putnam 

F. W. Rolt-Wheeler 



Elizabeth I. Samuel 
Donald C. Shafer 

Eugene Smith 
Frederick A. Talbot 

George M. Towle 

Charles Turner 
Rene Vallery-Radot 
Alpheus H. Verrill 



Wonders of Physical Science, 

Macmillan 
Romance of Modern Manufacture 
Romance of Modern Photography 
Scientific Ideas of Today, Lippincott 
Louis Agassiz, Small, Maynard 
Marvels of Geology, Lippincott 
Audubon the Naturalist, Appleton 
Earthquakes, Appleton 
Historic Inventions, Jacobs 
Preventable Diseases, Houghton 
Leading American Inventors, Holt 
How to Make and Operate Moving 

Pictures, Funk, Wagnalls 
Thomas A. Edison, Crowell 
Our Native Trees, Scribner 
Biology and Its Makers, Appleton 
Extinct Animals, Holt 
Life of the Bee, Dodd 
Triumphs and Wonders of Modern 

Chemistry, Van Nostrand 
Story of My Boyhood and Youth, 

Houghton 
Heroes of Today, Century 
The Land We Live In — Boy's Book 
of Conservation, Small, Maynard 
Lighthouses and Lightships of the 

United States, Houghton 
The Boy with the U. S. Fisheries 
The Boy with the U. S. Foresters 
The Boy with the U. S. Naturalists 
The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men, 

Lothrop 
Story of Iron, Penn 
Harper's \ Every-day Electricity, 

Harper 
Home Aquarium, Dutton 
All About Inventions and Dis- 
coveries, Funk, Wagnalls 
Heroes and Martyrs of Invention, 

Lothrop 
Aircraft Today, Lippincott 
Life of Pasteur, Doubleday 
Jungle Chums, Holt 
Pets for Pleasure and Profit, 
Scribner 



26 



402 READING AND LITERATURE 

Clarence M. Weed Birds in their Relation to Man, 

Lippincott 
Butterflies, Doubleday 
Archibald Williams How it Works, Nelson 

Romance of Modern Mechanism 
Romance of Modern Mining, 
Lippincott 
H. S. Williams Luther Burbank, His Life and 

Work, Hearst's International 
Library 
H. C. Wright Children's Stories of the Great Scien- 

tists, Scribner 
See lists in Industrial Arts and Vocational Guidance, Household 
Arts, and Biology in the Senior High School Lists, following. 



D. SENIOR HIGH SCHOOL 
(GRADES NINE THROUGH TWELVE) PUPILS ABOUT 14-19 

YEARS 

1. A LIST OP FUNDAMENTALS FROM WHICH CLASS 

READINGS WILL OFTENEST BE SELECTED 1 
Epics and Romances 

Isabel Hapgood Epic Songs of Russia, Scribner 

George Dasent, translator The Burnt Njal, Little, Brown; 

Dutton 
— or any literary version of the Norse Stories. 
Malory Morte D' Arthur, with selections 

from Tennyson's Idylls of the 
King. Dutton; Ginn; Altemus 
Isabel Butler, translator The Song of Roland, Houghton 

William Morris The Story of Sigurd the Volsung, 

Longmans 
Beowulf, Tinker translation, Newson; Gummere translation, Macmillan; 
W. E. Leonard translation, as yet unpublished; see Olrich, 
Heroic Legends of Denmark, American-Scandinavian Foun- 
dation. 
Jessie L. Weston, translator Gawain and the Green Knight, 

Nutt, London 
Andrew Lang, translator Aucassin and Nicolette, Crowell 

Gottfried von Strassburg Story of Tristan and Iseult, Jessie 

L. Weston, translator, Nutt 

1 Numbers in parentheses indicate suggested standard reading requirements for all 
schools and the grade proposed for each, (io, sophomore year, etc.) 



APPENDIX 



403 



Spenser 



Seward 

Palgrave (11 or 12) 



Poetry 

Chaucer (11 or 12) Canterbury Tales 

The Prologue, The Nun's Priest's 
Tale, The Pardoner's Tale, The 
Knight's Tale 
Complaint to His Purse. The 
Macaye and Tatlock Modern 
Reader's Chaucer, Macmillan; 
Oxford 
The Faerie Queen — Book I or Se- 
lections, Houghton; Macmillan; 
Merrill 
Narrative and Lyric Poems, Holt 
The Golden Treasury, with addi- 
tional poems. Parrish illustra- 
tions, Duffield; Oxford 
Note especially Marlowe, Shakespeare, Milton (L 'Allegro, 
II Penseroso, Sonnets), Cavalier Poets, Burns, Blake, Gray (Elegy 
in a Country Churchyard), Campbell, Scott, Keats, Wordsworth, 
Shelley (To a Skylark, Ozymandias), Coleridge, Tennyson. 
Coleridge (12) The Rime of the Ancient Mariner 

and selected poems; Dore" 
illustrations, Harper; Pogany 
illustrations, Crowell 
Byron The Prisoner of Chiton 

Browning Shorter Poems, Baker, Macmillan or 

Cunliffe; Scribner, editions 
Lanier, Emerson, Whitman and other American poets — Page 
collection or Stedman's American Anthology, Houghton, and 
A Collection of Modern Verse, Harcourt, Holt, or Macmillan — see 
the Poetry lists following. 



Stories and Studies of Character. 
Jane Austen 

Dickens 

Eliot 

Gaskell 

Goldsmith 



Pride and Prejudice, Brock 

illustrations — Jacobs 
David Copperfield, or another, 

"Phiz" illustration, Scribner 
Mill on the Floss, Macmillan, etc. 
Adam Bede, Dutton 
Cranford, Thomson illustrations, 

Macmillan 
The Vicar of Wakefield, Brock 

illustrations, Macmillan 



404 



READING AND LITERATUPvE 



Hawthorne 



Howells 
Thackeray 



Conrad 
Hardy 
Wharton 
Bunyan 



Drama 
Shakespeare 



Scarlet Letter, Macmillan, Thomson 

illustrations 
The House of Seven Gables (11 or 

12), Houghton 
Twice Told Tales, Mosses from an 
Old Manse (selections), Burt; 
Houghton; Macmillan 
Rise of Silas Lapham 
A Modern Instance, Houghton 
Henry Esmond, Thomson illustra- 
tions 
Vanity Fair, Macmillan (author's 

and Furniss' illustrations) 
Youth, Doubleday 
The Mayor of Casterbridge, Boni 
Ethan Frome, Scribner 
Pilgrim's Progress, Part I. W 
Strang etchings, Dutton 

Rhead illustrations. Macmillan 



Merchant of Venice (10), Harper; 

Crowell; Allyn; Ginn; etc. 
As You Like It (10), Thomson 

illustrations, Doran 
Twelfth Night (11), W. Heath 

Robinson illustrations, Doran, 

Hodder and Stoughton, London 
The Tempest, Dulac illustrations, 

Ibid. 
Macbelh (11), Crowell; Macmillan, 

etc. 
Hamlet (12) Crowell; Ginn; Merrill, 

etc. 
The Furness Variorum Shakespeare (Lippincott) is of course the 
standard reference works, and invaluable to teachers. 

Modern Plays 

Galsworthy Strife 

The Mob 

The Silver Box, Scribner 

Yeats The Land of Heart's Desire, 

Macmillan 

Synge Riders to the Sea, Luce 

— or a book of plays edited for high-school reading — Harcourt; 

Macmillan; Holt; Atlantic Monthly Press. 



APPENDIX 



405 



Essays, and the Like 
Thoreau 
Beebe 
Burroughs 



Bacon 
Sharp 
Addison and Steele 



Lamb 



Walden, Crowell; Macmillan 

Jungle Peace, Holt 

Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes, 

Houghton 
Manners, Of Studies, etc. 
Where Rolls the Oregon, Houghton 
(11) Sir Roger de Coverley Papers 

(selections), Brock illustrations, 
Dutton 
Essays of Elia, Brock illustrations, 

Scribner 
Self -Reliance, Friendship, Houghton 
Travels with a Donkey 
An Inland Voyage 
Letters 

On Truth in Intercourse, Scribner 
Essay on Burns and Selections from 

Burns , Macmillan; Houghton 
Essay on Johnson, Macmillan 
Autobiography, A Piece of Chalk, 
Macmillan 
— or a book of representative essays (Dutton, Holt, Atlantic Monthly- 
Press, Allyn). See an excellent bibliography of essays in the Illinois 
Bulletin for March, 1922. 

Autobiography, Boyd Smith illus- 
trations, Holt 
Landmarks of Liberty, Harcourt: 
Lincoln; Beecher — abridgments. 

Addresses, Letters, State Papers 
The American Spirit, Stokes 
The Flag to Its Makers, Govern- 
ment Printing Office 
Farewell Address 



Emerson 

Stevenson 



Carlyle (11 or 12) 

Macaulay (11 or 12) 
Huxley 



Franklin (11) 

Noonan and St. John (4) 
Otis; Pitt; Burke; 
Lincoln 
Franklin K. Lane 



Washington 
Webster 



Bunker Hill Address 

SUPPLEMENTARY READING 
POETRY 



'William R. Benet 



*Rupert Brooke 



Merchants from Cathay 
The Burglar of the Zodiac 
The Horse-Thief, How to Catch 
Unicorns, and Others, Yale Uni- 
versity Press 
The Great Lover, Sonnets on the 
War, in his Collected Poems, 
Lane 



406' 



READING AND LITERATURE 



Stephen Crane 
*T. A. Daly 
R. H. Davies 



*Paul Lawrence Dunbar 
♦Ralph Waldo Emerson 



*James Elroy Flecker 



The Black Riders, Sherman, French 
Macaroni Ballads, Harcourt 
Collected Poems, Knopf 
The Captive Lion and other 

poems, Yale Press 
Complete Poems, Dodd 
Each and All 
The Day's Ration 
Days 

Forbearance 
Threnody in Page's Chief American 

Poets, Houghton 
Collected Poems 



Especially The Old Ships, Doubleday. 



* Anita Forbes 
♦Robert Frost 



Wilfrid Wilson Gibson 

Especially Hoops 
quiller-couch 

Robert Graves 
goldmark and hopkins 

Joyce Kilmer 
*Rudyard Kipling 

♦Sidney Lanier 



♦S. A. Leonard, editor 
♦Vachel Lindsay 

J. A. Lomax 
E. V. Lucas 



Modern Poetry, Holt 
A Boy's Will 
North of Boston 
Mountain Interval, Holt 
Daily Bread, Battle and Other Poems, 
Borderlands and Thoroughfares 
(about Gentleman John), Macmillan. 

Oxford Book of English Verse, 

Oxford Press 
Fairies and Fusileers, Knopf 
The Gypsy Trail, An Anthology for 

Campers, Kennerly 
Trees and other poems, Doran 
Collected Verse, inclusive edition, 

Doubleday 
Poems: Clover, The Marshes of 
Glenn, Sunrise, Owl Against 
Robin, The Symphony, in Page's 
Chief American Poets, or in 
Selections by Callaway or by 
H. W. Lanier, Scribner 
Poems of the War and the Peace, 

Harcourt 
The Congo 

The Chinese Nightingale, Macmillan 
Cowboy Songs, Sturgis & Walton 
The Open Road, A Little Book for 
Wayfarers, Holt 



APPENDIX 



407 



*John Masefield Dauber, or Story of a Roundhouse 

Salt Water Ballads, illustrations 

by Pears 
Enslaved 

Reynard the Fox, Macmillan 
A Few Figs from Thistles, Shay 
Second April, Kennedy 
The New Poetry, Macmillan 
Poems, Gloucester Moors, On a 
Soldier Fallen in the Philip- 
pines, Houghton 
Collected Poems, 3 Vol., Touchstone 
on a Buss, Sherwood (A Robin 
Hood Play) 
Ballads of the Trawling Fleet, Stokes 
Drake 

War and Laughter, Century 
Chief American Poets, Houghton 
War Poems, Heinemann, London 
Scum 0' the Earth and other poems, 

Houghton 
Fifty Folk Songs, H. W. Gray 
The Revenge, and selected poems, in 

Palgrave, or 
Tennyson* s Lyrical Poems, 

Macmillan 
The Sicilian Idylls, Sherman 

French; Putman 
Modern American Poetry 
Modern British Poetry, Harcourt 
Excellent selective and critical anthologies for high school. 



Edna St. Vincent Nillay 

Monroe and Henderson 
*William Vaughn Moody 



*Alfred Noyes 



James Oppenheim 
*Curtis Hidden Page 
"Siegfried Sassoon 
^Robert Haven Schauffler 

Cecil Sharp 
*Alfred Tennyson 



Theocritus 



*Louis Utermeyer 



Gleeson White 
Walt Whitman 



Margaret Widdemer 
♦Marguerite Wilkinson 
An anthology. 

Anonymous 



Ballades and Rondeaux, Simmons 

i" Hear America Singing 

Mannahatta 

Crossing Brooklyn Ferry 

Memories of President Lincoln and 
other Lyrics of the War — especi- 
ally: "When Lilacs Last in the 
Dooryard Bloomed." See Page's 
Chief American Poets, Houghton 

Factories, and other lyrics. Holt 
^hw {Voices, Macmillan 

PLAYS 

The Farce of Master Pierre Patelin, 
R. T. Holbrook translation, 
Houghton 



408 



READING AND LITERATURE 



Lewis Beach 



Arnold Bennett 



Gordon Bottomley 



James Barrie The Admirable Crichton 

Echoes of the War 

The Old Lady Shows her Medals 

Half-Hours 
The Twelve-Pound Look 

What Every Woman Knows, Scribner 
The Clod, In Washington Square 
Plays, Doubleday 

The Great Adventure 

The Title, Doran 

King Lear s Wife, Constable, 
London 

The Riding to Lithend, In King 
Lear's Wife, and in The Atlantic 
Book of Modern Plays, Atlantic 
Press 
A powerful Icelandic tragedy out of the Burnt Njal. 
Harold Brighouse Hobson's Choice, Constable, Lon- 

don, and Doubleday, New York 

Maid of France, Gowans, and Gray, 
Glasgow 

Lonesome-Like, in The Atlantic 
Book of Modern Plays 

The Price of Coal, Gowans and Gray 

The Bank Account in Harvard Dra- 
matic Club Plays, First Series, 
Brentano 

James and John 

Mary's \ Wedding, in Four Plays, 
Sidgwick, London 

The Philosopher of Butterbiggens, 
in The Atlantic Book of Modern 
Plays, Atlantic Monthly Press 

The Dumb and the Blind 

The Threshold, all in Comedies of 
Harold Chapin, Chatto, London 

Abraham and Isaac, in Little The- 
ater Classics, Vol. II 

Mogu the Wanderer 

Thomas Muskerry, Little, Brown 

Allison's Lad 

The Captain of the Gate, in The 
Atlantic Book of Modern Plays; 
both in Allison's Lad and Other 
Martial Interludes, Holt 
A scene in the resistance to Cromwell's invasion of Ireland. 



Harold Brock 



Gilbert Cannan 



Harold Chapin 



Chaster Plays 



Padraic Colum 



Beulah M. Dix 



APPENDIX 



409 



John Drinkwater 



Lord Dunsany 



St. John Ervine 



Euripides 



J. O. Ferguson 



Anatole France 



John Galsworthy 



Susan Glaspell 

Oliver Goldsmith 

Lady Gregory 

Comical bits of Irish villagery 
Henrik Ibsen 



Abraham Lincoln, Sidgwick and 

Jackson, London; Houghton 
Five Plays, Little, Brown 
A Night at an Inn, in Plays of Gods 

and Men, Luce, Boston 
The Orangeman 
The Critics, Maunsel and Co., 

Dublin 
Jane Clegg, Sidgwick & Jackson, 

London 
Alcestis, Gilbert Murray, translator 

— Oxford; Way translation, 

Putnam, Vol. IV 
Campbell of Kilmor, in The Atlantic 

Book of Modern Plays, Atlantic 

Press 
The Man Who Married a Dumb 

Wife, Translated by Curtis 

Hidden Page, Lane 
The Eldest Son 
Justice 

The Little Man 
The Sun, Scribner 
Trifles, in Washington Square 

Plays, Doubleday 

She Stoops to Conquer, Thomson 

illustrations, Doran 
Seven Plays 
New Irish Comedies, Putnam 



An Enemy of the People 
The Doll's House 
The Lady from the Sea, Boni, 
Dutton 
Percy MacKaye The Canterbury Pilgrims 

The Scarecrow, Macmillan 
Gettysburg, in The Atlantic Book 
of Modern Plays, Atlantic Press 
A Civil War veteran on Memorial Day. 
Maurice Maeterlinck Ardiane and Blue Beard, Dodd 

A Miracle of Saint Anthony 
The Intruder 
The Death of Tintagiles 
Interior {or Home), Boni, Liveright; 
Dodd 



4io 



READING AND LITERATURE 



John M. Manly 



Marlowe 
John Masefield 



George Middleton 



Moliere 



Allan Monkhouse 

William Vaughan Moody 
Eugene O'Neill 



A whaling captain "bound to 
long and horrible voyage. 
Winthrop Parkhurst 



The ostrich method of dealing 
Josephine Preston Peabody 

Eden Phillpotts 



Edmond Rostand 
Hans Sachs 

Arthur Schnitzler 



Specimens of Pre-Shakesperian 

Drama, Ginn 
Noah's Flood and The Second 

Shepherd's Play from The Towne- 

ley Cycle 
The Jew of Malta, Merrill 
Pompey the Great 
The Sweeps of Ninety-Eight, 

Macmillan 
The Tragedy of Nan, Richards, 

London 
The Black Tie, in Possession and 

Other One- Act Plays 
Masks, and Other One- Act Plays, 

Holt 
Tides, also in The Atlantic Book of 

Modern Plays, Atlantic Press 
The Bourgeois Gentleman 
The Miser 

The Imaginary Invalid 
Les Precieuses Ridicules 
The Doctor in Spite of Himself, 

Curtis Hidden Page, translator, 

Putnam 
Night Watches, in War Plays, 

Constable, London 
The Faith Healer, Macmillan 
Beyond the Horizon, Boni 
He, in The Atlantic Book of Modern 

Plays, Atlantic Press 
jit the ile, ' ' and his wife, mad with the 

The Beggar and the King, in The 
Atlantic Book of Modern Plays, 
Atlantic Press 
with unpleasant realities. 
Marlowe 

The Piper, Houghton 
The Shadow, in Three Plays 
The Mother 

The Point of View, in 
Curtain Raisers, Duckworth & Cc. 
Cyrano de Bergerac, Stokes 
The Merry Tales, translated by 
William Leighton, Nutt, London 
Last Masks, Translated in Anatol 
and Other Plays, Boni 



APPENDIX 



411 



Shakespeare 



George Bernard Shaw 



Sheridan 
Sophocles 

John Mjllington Synge 



William Butler Yeats 



A Comedy of Errors 

Much Ado About Nothing 

King Lear 

Othello 

Henry IV 

Henry V 

Richard II 

Richard III 

Romeo and Juliet 

Androcles and the Lion, Csesar and 

Cleopatra, in Three Plays for 

Puritans 
The Man of Destiny, O 'Flaherty, 

V.C., in Heartbreak House, 

Constable, London 
The Rivals, Dutton, Oxford, etc. 
Antigone, Way translation, Mac- 

millan 
Riders to the Sea, in The Atlantic 

Book of Modern Plays, Atlantic 

Press 
Deirdre of the Sorrows 
In the Shadow of the Glen, J. W. 

Luce 
The Land of Heart's Desire, 

Macmillan, and in The Atlantic 

Book of Modern Plays, Atlantic 

Press 
Katherine ni Houlihan, 
The Pot of Broth, Macmillan 



STORIES OP CHARACTER 



Balzac 



Barrie 



William Black 
Alice Brown 



Father Goriot 

In the Days of the Terror, 

Putnam 
The Cat and Racket, Dutton 
The Little Minister, Crowell; 

Grossett 
A Window in Thrums, Scribner; 

Burt 
Judith Shakespeare, Harper 
Meadow Grass, Country Neighbors, 

Houghton 



1 Many of these are for individual recommendations to mature pupils only; all 
can be understood only by those pupils who have been helped to take interest in 
character delineation, and not in plot merely. 



412 



READING AND LITERATURE 



George W. Cable 



Old Creole Days 

The Grandissimes 

Posson Jone, Scribner 

Don Quixote, W. Heath Robinson 

illustrations, Button 
Lord Jim 
The Nigger of the Narcissus, 

Doubleday 
Children of the Sea, Dodd 
Ten Tales, Harper 
The Captain's Vices" and "My Friend Meurtrier." 
The Red Badge of Courage, 

Appleton 
Letters from My Mill, Little, 

Brown; Putnam 
Joseph Vance, Grossett 
Tales from Maria Edgeworth, 

Thomson illustrations, Stokes 
See the "Barring out of Party Spirit. " 



Cervantes 



Joseph Conrad 



Francois Coppee 

Note especially 
Stephen Crane 

Alphonse Daudet 

William DeMorgan 
Marie Edgeworth 



George Eliot 
Anatole France 



Mary E. Wilkins Freeman 



Galsworthy 



Hamlin Garland 
Thomas Hardy 



Robert Herrick 
William Dean Howells 



Helen Hunt Jackson 
Henry James 

Kipling 



Locke 



Romola, Dutton 

The Crime of Sylvester Bonnard, 

Holt; Boni (introduction by 

Hearn) 
A New England Nun, Harper 
A Humble Romance, Oxford 
The Freelands 
The Patrician, Scribner 
The Country House 
A Man of Property, Putnam 
Main Traveled Roads, Harper 
Under the Greenwood Tree 
Tess of the D' Urbervilles 
Wessex Tales 

The Return of the Native, Harper 
The Common Lot, Macmillan 
A Modern Instance 
The Rise of Silas Lapham, 

Houghton 
Ramona, Little, Brown 
The Private Life, Harper 
The Real Thing, Macmillan 
Kim, Doubleday 
The Day's Work 
Many Inventions, Doubleday; 

Grossett 
Life's Handicap, Doubleday 
The Beloved Vagabond, Lane 



APPENDIX 



4i3 



Ian Maclaren Beside the Bonnie Briar Bush, 

Dodd 
The Coward 
The Necklace 
The Odd Number 
A Piece of String, Harper 
The Ordeal of Richard Feverel 
The Egoist 

Evan Harrington, Seribner 
The Jessamy Bride, Century 
Tales of Mean Streets, Methuen, 

London 
The Octopus 
The Pit 

A Deal in Wheat, Doubleday 
Red Rock 
The Ole Virginia 
Marse Chan, Seribner 
Brunei's Tower 
Green Alleys 
Old Delabole, Macmillan 
The Harbor, Macmillan; Grossett 
His Family, Grossett 
Divine Fire, Holt 

The Jungle, Doubleday; Grossett 
King Coal, Macmillan 
Parable of the Cherries 
The Broken Wall (short stories), 

Revell 
Master of Ballantrae 
The Bottle Imp 

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Seribner 
Alice Adams, Doubleday 
Henry Esmond, Thomson illustra- 
tions, Macmillan 
Pendennis 

The Newcomes, Oxford 
What Men Live By 
Master and Man, Crowell 
The House by the Medlar -Tree, 
Harper 
Village life in Italy, unsparingly pictured. 
H. G. Wells Mr. Britling Sees it Through, 

Macmillan 
History of Mr. Polly, Duffield 
Kipps, Seribner 



Maupassant 



George Meredith 



F. F. Moore 
Morrison 

Frank Norris 



Thomas Nelson Page 



Eden Phillpotts 



Ernest Poole 

May Sinclair 
Upton Sinclair 

Edward A. Steiner 



Robert Louis Stevenson 



Booth Tarkington 
W. M. Thackeray 



Tolstoi 



Verga 



414 



READING AND LITERATURE 



Wharton 



Israel Zangwill 



AlNSWORTH 



Crucial ' Instances 

The Touchstone 

The Descent of Man, Scribner 

Children of the Ghetto, Grossett; 

Macmillan 
Dreamers of the Ghetto, Harper 



TALES OF ADVENTURE 



Dutton; 



The Tower of London 

Guy Fawkes, Dutton 

Typhoon, Putnam 

The Spy 

The Pilot 

Leather -Stocking Tales, Houghton; 

Burt 
Saracinesca, Macmillan 
The Three Musketeers, 

Appleton 
The Count of Monte Cristo 
Twenty Years After, Dutton 
The Reds of the Midi, T. Janvier 

introduction, Appleton 
Thorgils 

Brazenhead the Great, Dodd 
Hunchback of Notre Dame 
Les Miserables 

Toilers of the Sea, Burt; Holt 
The Light That Failed 
With the Night Mail, Doubleday 
"This story is especially interesting just now because the book was 
written before anyone thought aeroplanes would be used to any 
great extent." — Ninth-grade Boy. 



Joseph Conrad 

James Fennimore Cooper 



F. Marion Crawford 

Dumas 



Felix Gras 



Hewlett 



Hugo 



Kipling 



Lever 

London 

Justin McCarthy 



Morgan Robertson 
Scott 

Sienkiewicz 
Stevenson 



Frank R, Stockton 



Charles O'Malley, Dutton 

The Sea Wolf, Macmillan 

The Glorious Rascal, Lane 

If I Were King (the same story 

dramatized), Harper 
Spun- Yarn, Harper 
Kenilworth 

Fortunes of Nigel, Dutton 
With Fire and Sword, Little, Brown 
St. Ives 

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde 
Master of Ballantrae 
David Balfour, Scribner 
The Adventures of Captain Horn, 

Century 



APPENDIX 



4i5 



vIark Twain 
I. G. Wells 



jEORGE Ade 
VLDRICH 



The Prince and the Pauper 

Harper 
War of the Worlds, Harper 
The Wonderful Visit, Dutton 
Thirty Strange Stories, Harper 
Grace Fallows Norton, translator, 
The Odyssey of a Torpedoed 

Transport, Houghton 



CHIEFLY FOR FUN 



lETTINA VON ARMIN 
)AISY ASHFORD 



Fables in Slang, Duffield 

Marjoric Daw 

Ponkapog Papers 

Two Bites at a Cherry, Houghton 

Elizabeth and Her German Garden, 

Macmillan 
The Young Visiters, Doran 



Introduced by Sir James Barrie. 



.ALPH BERGENGREN 

-. A. Birmingham 
.'.. C. Bunner 



M. Crothers 



LPHONSE DAUDET 



illiam Henry Drummond 

P. Dunne 
)rd dunsany 
ithur guiterman 
iarles Dickens 



S. Gilbert 



The Comforts of Home, Atlantic Press. 
Spanish Gold, Doran 
Short Sixes, Puck 

Love Letters of Smith 

The Tenor 

Hector 

Zenobia's Infidelity 
The Gentle Reader 
The Pardoner's Wallet 
Pleasures of an Absentee Landlord, 

Houghton 
Tartarin of Tarascon, Crowell; 

Dutton 
Habitant and other typical poems, 

Putnam 
Mr. Dooley's Philosophy, Harper 
Fifty-one Tales, Little, Brown 
The Laughing Muse, Harper 
Pickwick Papers, Aldin illustrations, 

Dutton, 2 Vol.; "Phiz" illus- 
trations, Scribner, 2 Vol. 
Original Plays, especially 
Pinafore 
Engaged 
The Mikado 
Rosencrantz 

Scribner 



and Guildenstern^ 



416 



READING AND LITERATURE 



Holmes Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, 

Dutton 
Over the Teacups, Houghton 
William Dean Howells Buying a Horse, Houghton 

Leonard Hulit Fishing With a Boy, Stewart & Kidd 

"A prize for the fisherman, be he young or old — a volume whose 
fly-leaf is likely to be inscribed at Christmas ' Daddy and Jimmy — 
from each other. ' "— M. H. B. M. 
Leigh Hunt Essays, e. g., Graces and Anxieties 

of Pigs, Dutton 
Washington Irving Knickerbocker's History of New 

York, Parrish illustrations, Dodd 
W. W. Jacobs Many Cargoes, Stokes 

Captains All 
Short Cruises, Scribner 
Amusing short stories of the sea — especially "A Black Affair" 
(a cat) and "A Change of Treatment." 



Jerome K. Jerome 
Stephen Leacock 
W. E. Leonard 

G. H. Lorimer 



Peter MacArthur 



Robert Haven Schauffler 

Charles G. Stewart 
Frank R. Stockton 



See a pupil's note, pp. 273 f. 
Robert Louis Stevenson 
Simeon Strunsky 
Mark Twain 



Warner 

Carolyn Wells 
Elizabeth Woodbridge 



Three Men in a Boat, Burt 

Nonsense Novels, Lane 

Aesop and Hyssop, Open Court 

Publishing Co. 
Letters of a Self- Made Merchant to 

His Son, Small 
Old Gorgon Graham, Doubleday 
The Red Cow and Her Friends, Lane 
Reynard the Fox, Crane illustrations, 

Nutt, London 
Fiddlers Errant 

Fiddlers Militant, Atlantic Press 
The Fugitive Blacksmith, Century 
The Lady or the Tiger, Scribner 
The Casting Away of Mrs. Leeks and 

Mrs. Aleshine, Century 
'The Vizier of the Two-Horned 

Alexander, Century 

Fables, Scribner 

Belshazzar Court, Holt 

A Connecticut Yankee in King 

Arthur's Court 
Pudd'n-head Wilson 
Innocents Abroad 
Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg, 

Harper 
My Summer in a Garden 
In the Wilderness, Houghton 
A Parody Anthology, Scribner 
Jonathan Papers, Houghton 



APPENDIX 



4i7 



QUESTIONS YOU 
Jane Add am s 

Arnold Bennett 

Le Baron R. Briggs 

James Bryce 
Emerson 

W. R. George 
Phillip Gibbs 

Will Irwin 
William James 



Donald Lowrie 
Frederick Palmer 
Jacob Riis 



Olive Schreiner 
Scott Nearing 
John Spargo 

Edward A. Steiner 

Robert Louis Stevenson 

Ida M. Tarbell 

Marie Van Vorst 
Woodrow Wilson 
Lillian Wald 
Harry F. Ward 



HAVE THOUGHT ABOUT 

Twenty Years at Hull House 
The Spirit of Youth and the City 

Streets, Macmillan 
The Human Machine 
Friendship and Happiness, Doran 
To College Girls 
College Life 

Good Citizenship, Houghton 
Self -Reliance, Putnam 
Friendship, Dutton 
The Junior Republic, Appleton 
Now It Can Be Told 
More That Must Be Told, Harper 
The Next War, Dutton 
The Moral Equivalent of War, 

American Association for Inter- 
national Conciliation 
My Life in Prison, Kennerley 
Folly of the Nations, Century 
Children of the Tenements 
The Battle with the Slum, Macmillan 
How the Other Half Lives, Scribner 
Woman and Labor, Stokes 
Social Religion, Macmillan 
The Bitter Cry of the Children, 

Macmillan 
Nationalizing America 
On the Trail of the Immigrant, Revell 
Virginibus Puerisque (for Boys and 

Girls), Putnam 
A Christmas Sermon, Scribner 
The Business of Being a Woman, 

Macmillan 
The Woman Who Toils, Doubleday 
The New Freedom, Doubleday 
The House on Henry Street, Holt 
The Gospel for a Working World, 

Missionary Education Movement 



BIOGRAPHY AND LETTERS 

James Barrie Margaret Ogilvie, Scribner 

Story of his mother. 
Edward Bok A Dutch Boy Fifty Years After, 

Scribner 
Abridgment of The Americanization of Edward Bok. 
27 



4i8 



READING AND LITERATURE 



BONSTELLE AND DEFOREST 
BOSWELL 

Gamaliel Bradford 
Frances Callaway 

Jane W. Carlyle 

Carlyle 

Benvenuto Cellini 
Gamaliel Bradford 
Paul L. Ford 



Benjamin Franklin 
B. B. Gilchrist 



Little Women Letters from the House 

of Alcott, Little, Brown 
Life of Johnson — selections — Burt 
Robert E. Lee, American, Houghton 
Charm and Courtesy in Letter 

Writing, Dodd 
Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh 

Carlyle, Scribner 
Heroes and Hero Worship, Scribner 
Autobiography, Collier 
Louisa May Alcott, Houghton 
The True George Washington 
The True Benjamin Franklin, 

Lippincott 
Autobiography, American Book Co. 
The Life of 'Mary Lyon, Little, Brown 



Biography of the founder of Mount Holyoke College. 



WlLLARD GRENFELL 

Hamlin Garland 

Julia C. Harris 

Howells 

Caroline Hunt 
Joseph Husband 

Huxley 



Washington Irving 
Helen Keller 

Henry Cabot Lodge 
E. V. Lucas 

Collections of excellent letters. 
Motley 

Nicolay and Hay 
George Herbert Palmer 

Cornelia S. Parker 

Plutarch 



A Labrador Doctor, An Autobiog- 
raphy, Houghton 

A Son of the Middle Border, 
Macmillan 

Life and Letters of Joel Chandler 
Harris, Houghton 

Literary Friends and Acquaintance 

My Mark Twain, Harper 

Life of Ellen H. Richards, Whitcomb 

Americans by Adoption, Atlantic 
Press 

Autobiography and Essays — se- 
lections — Appleton ; Macmillan 
Pocket Classics 

Life of Washington, Crowell; Burt 

Story of My Life, Doubleday; 
Grossett 

George Washington, Houghton 

The Gentlest Art 

The Second Post, Macmillan 



Peter the Great, Merrill 

Life of Lincoln, Century 

Life of Alice Freeman Palmer, 

Houghton 
An American Idyll: Life of Carle - 

ton H. Parker, Atlantic Monthly 
Lives — selections — Ginn; Putnam, 

etc. 



APPENDIX 



419 



A. M. Ravage 
Jacob Riis 

A. M. Rihbany 
Anna Howard Shaw 
Shelley 

Carl Shurz 
E. A. Steiner 
Elinor Stewart 

Thackeray 



Silvanus P. Thompson 
Booker T. Washington 



An American in the Making, Harper 
The Making of an American 

Macmillan 
A Far Journey, Houghton 
The Story of a Pioneer, Harper 
Gilbert White and Shelbourne, 

Scribner 
Abraham Lincoln, Houghton 
From Alien to Citizen, Revell 
Letters of a Woman Homesteader, 

Houghton 
Letters to an American Family, 

Century 
English Humorists, Oxford 
Life of Faraday, Macmillan 
Ui> from Slavery, Doubleday 



TRAVELS IN TIME AND SPACE 



ASHTON 



R. M. Ballantyne 
Percy Boynton 

Bolles 

Isabel Butler 
Thomas Carlyle 



Robert Chambers 
Mildred Cram 

Darwin 

Dawson 

C. A. Eastman 

Alice Morse Earle 



Fritz Endell 
Fell 



Social 'Life in the Reign of Queen 
1 Anne, Scribner importation 
Ungava, Dutton 
London in English Literature, Univ. 

of Chicago Press 
At the North of Bear camp Water, 

Houghton 
Tales from the Old French, Houghton 
The Storming of the Bastille and other 

Chapters in the French Revolution, 

Dutton 
Book of Days, Lippincott 
Old Seaport Towns, Dodd; Drawings 

by Allan G. Cram 
A Naturalist's Voyage Around the 

World, Appleton 
Confederate Girl's Diary, Houghton 
Soul of the Indian, Houghton 
Old Indian Days, Doubleday 
Customs and Fashions in Old New 

England, Scribner 
Curious Punishments in By-gone 

Days, Duffield 
Stagecoach and Tavern Days, 

Macmillan 
Old Tavern Signs, Houghton 
Russian and Nomad, Life on the 

Khirgez Steppe in Asia, Dumeld 



420 



READING AND LITERATURE 



Robert J. Flaherty 



Josiah Flint (J. F. Willard) 
Harry A. Franck 

Grinnell 



E. E. Hale 

J. L. and B. Hammond 
J. T. Headland 
Lafcadio Hearn 

Hunt 

J. Husband 
Irving 

Pennell illustrations. 
J. J. Jusserand 



Horace Kephart 

F. H. King 

H. K. W. Kumm 

Lucy Larcom 
Leith 

Macaulay 



Jean Mackenzie 

Travels of Sir John Manderville, 

Motley 

John Muir 



The Belcher Islands in Hudson Bay 
Two Traverses Across Ungave 
Peninsula, Labrador, Geograph- 
ical Review 
Tramping with Tramps, Century 
A Vagabond Journey Around the 

World, Century 
The Fighting Cheyennes, Scribner 
The Story of the Indian, Appleton 
Beyond the Old Frontier, Scribner 
A New England Boyhood, Little, 

Brown 
The Village Labourer, Longmans 
Home Life in China, Macmillan 
Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, 

Houghton 
Life in America One Hundred Years 

Ago, Harper 
America at Work, Houghton 
The Alhambra, Burt 

English Wayfaring Life in the 

Middle Ages, Putnam 
With Americans of Past and 

Present Days, Scribner 
Our Southern Highlanders, Outing 

Pub. Co. 
Farmers of Forty Centuries, Mrs. F. 

H. King, Madison, Wisconsin 
Missionary Heroes of Africa, 

Macmillan 
A New England Girlhood, Houghton 
A Summer and Winter on Hudson's 

Bay, Cantwell Printing Co. 
England in 1685 — Chapter III of 

the History of England, Ginn; 

Oxford, etc. 
Black Sheep, Houghton 

modernized spelling, Macmillan 
Rise of the Dutch Republic, Dutton; 

Oxford 
Travels in Alaska 
My First Summer in the Sierras, 

Houghton 



APPENDIX 



421 



Parkman The Jesuits in North America 

The Struggle for a Continent, Little, 
Brown 
Sir John Franklin's Narrative, Dutton, Everyman's 
Ernest Poole The Village, Macmillan 

A Russian village during the Revolution. 



Pre scott 



Marjorie and Charles 

quennell 

Illustrated by the authors. 
Carolyn Richards 



Theodore Roosevelt 



E. A. Ross 



Henry M. Stanley 



Steffansson 



Robert Louis Stevenson 



Reuben Gold Thwaites 



Alice Tisdale 

Turley 
Mark Twain 

Walsh 

S. E. White 



William Beebe 
John Burroughs 

Chapman 

Comstock 



Conquest of Mexico 

Conquest of Peru, Everyman's 

Library 
History of Everyday Things in 

England, Scribner, 2 Vol. 

Village Life in America, Holt 

A Girl's Diary, 1852-72, Mrs. E. C. 

Clark, Naples, New York 
African Game Trails, Scribner 
Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, 

Putnam 
The Changing Chinese 
South of Panama, Century 
How I Found Livingstone 
In Darkest Africa, Scribner 
My Life Among the Eskimos, 

Macmillan 
Travels with a Donkey 
An Inland Voyage 
The Amateur Emigrant, Scribner 
How George Rogers Clark Won the 

Northwest, McClurg 
Father Marquette, Appleton 
Pioneering Where the World is Old, 

Holt 
Voyages of Captain Scott, Dodd 
Life on the Mississippi 
Roughing It, Harper 
Curiosities ■ of Popular Customs, 

Lippincott 
The Westerners 
The Blazed Trail, Doubleday 



NATURE OBSERVINGS 

Jungle Nights, Holt 

Wake-Robin 

Birds and Bees, Houghton 

Story of Bird Life, Appleton 

Travels of Birds, Macmillan 

Insect Life, Appleton 



422 



READING AND LITERATURE 



W. H. Hudson 
Jordan and Kellogg 
David Starr Jordan 



M. Maeterlinck 



Enos A. Mills 



J. H. Fabre Social Life in the Insect World, 

Century 
Idle Days in Patagonia, Dutton 
Animal Life, Appleton- 
Science Sketches, especially Story of 
a Stone, and The Salmon, 
McClurg 
The Life of the Bee 
Our Friend the Dog, Dodd 
In the Beaver World 
Wild Life in the Rockies, Houghton 
Morley The Bee People, Houghton 

Peckham Wasps, Socialand Solitary, Houghton 

Observations by two Wisconsin people. 
N. S. Sealer Sea and Land, Scribner 

John Tyndall The Forms of Water, Appleton 

H. D. Thoreau Camping in the Main Woods, Dutton 

Walden 
Life alone in a cottage on Walden Pond, while the author " sup- 
ported himself with one hand. " 



Van Dyke 



Gilbert White 



Little Rivers 

Fisherman's Luck, Scribner 
Natural History of Selbourne, 
Caldwell 



3. , 'SUBJECT-MATTER" BOOKS 

List of Books Recommended for Intensive Reading * in American 

History 

The Colonies, Longmans 
Formation of the Union 
Social and Economic Forces in 

American History, Longmans 
Division and Reunion, Longmans 
Economic History of the United 

States, Longmans 
Great Epochs in American History, 

Funk, Wagnalls 
Readings in American History, Ginn 
History of the United States of 

America, Macmillan 
Development of American Nation- 
ality, American Book Co. 

1 This and the European History lists are from a report of the Committee of the 
Mississippi ValleyHistorical Association on "Standardizing Library Work and Library 
Equipment for History in Secondary Schools," School Review (29:13s). February, 192 1. 
Reprinted by permission, with a few additions suggested by the chairman, 
Mr. H. C. Hill, of the University High School, Chicago University. 



R. G. Thwaites 
A. B. Hart 



Woodrow Wilson 

E. L. Bogart 

F. W. Halsey 

D. S. Muzzey 
H. W. Elson 

C. R. Fish 



APPENDIX 



423 



Paul Haworth 
Bassett 
Green 
Sparks 



Parkman 
Barstow 
Sanford 

LlNGLEY 



The United States in Our Own Times, 

Macmillan 
Short History of the United States, 

Macmillan 
Beginnings of American Nationality, 

Macmillan 
Men Who Made the Nation, 

Macmillan 
Expansion of the American People, 

Scott 
The Oregon Trail, Longmans; Ginn 
The Westward Movement, Century 
Story of Agriculture, Heath 
Since the Civil War, Century 



BOOKS USEFUL FOR EXTENSIVE READING IN AMERICAN 

HISTORY 



Chestnut 
Charnwood 
Drinkwater 
Dana 

Earle 

Ford 

Bassett 

Brooks 

Larcom 

Russell 

Brady 

Eliza M. Ripley 

El son 

Nicolay 
Hagedorn 
Laut 
Haworth 

Lodge and Roosevelt 

Sanford 

Roosevelt 



A Diary of Dixie, Appleton 
Abraham Lincoln, Holt 
Abraham Lincoln, A Play, Houghton 
Two Years Before the Mast, 

Macmillan 
Home Life in Colonial Days, 

Lippincott 
The True George Washington, 

Lippincott 
The Story of Lumber, Rand 
The Story of Cotton, Rand 
A New England Girlhood, Houghton 
My Diary, North and South 
The True Andrew Jackson, 

Lippincott 
Social Life in Old New Orleans, 

Appleton 
Sidelights on American History, 

Macmillan 
Boy's Life of Lincoln, Century 
Boy's Life of Roosevelt, Harper 
Pathfinders of the West, Macmillan 
George Washington, Farmer, Bobbs- 

Merrill Co. 
Hero Tales from American History, 

Century 
Story of Agriculture in the United 

States, Heath 
Episodes from the Winning of the 

West, Putnam 



424 



READING AND LITERATURE 



Parkman Fiske, and McMaster Various Volumes 



Rhodes 

Such Historical Novels as: 
Churchill 
Johnston 

Hough 

WlSTER 

Ford 
Thompson 



Selected Passages 

The Crisis, Macmillan 

Lewis Rand, Houghton; Bobbs- 

Merrill Co. 
Fifty-four Forty or Fight, Bobbs- 

Merrill Co. 
The Virginian, Macmillan 
The Honorable Peter Stirling, Holt; 

Grossett 
Alice of Old Vincennes, Grossett 

LIST OF BOOKS USEFUL FOR INTENSIVE READING IN 
EUROPEAN HISTORY 



E. J. Lowell 
C. A. Herrick 
Hutton Webster 

F. A. Ogg 

C. J. H. Hayes 

J. H. Robinson and C. H. 

Beard 
C. D. Hazen 
J. S. Shapiro 

W. S. Davis 
R. G. Usher 
Shailer Mathews 

G. B. Adams 

Osgood 
Trevelyan 



The Eve of the French Revolution, 

Houghton 
History of Commerce and Industry, 

Macmillan 
Readings in Medieval and Modern 

History, Heath 
Economic Development of Modern 

Europe, Macmillan 
Political and Social History of 

Modern Europe, Macmillan 
Development of Modern Europe, 

Vols. I and II, Ginn 
Modern European History, Holt' 
Modern and Contemporary European 

History, Houghton 
The Roots of the War, Houghton 
Story of the Great War, Macmillan 
French Revolution, Longmans 
Growth of the French Nation, 

Macmillan 
History of Industry, Ginn 
Garibaldi and the Thousand, 

Longmans 

BOOKS USEFUL FOR EXTENSIVE READING IN EUROPEAN 

HISTORY 



Simpson 

Mathews 

Rose 

Smiles 

Green 



Rise of Louis Napoleon, Putnam 
French Revolution, Longmans 
Life of Napoleon I, Macmillan 
Lives of the Engineers, Scribner 
Short History of the English Peopk 
American Book Co. 







APPENDIX 425 


Henderson 




Short History of Germany, Macmillan 


Motley 




Life of Peter the Great, Merrill 


Southey 




Life of Nelson, Dutton 


Tappan 




In Days Victorian, Lothrop 


Wallace 




Wonderful Century, Dodd 


Such NoveL 


• as: 




Reade 




Cloister and the Hearth, Scott 


Kingsley 




Westward Ho!, Macmillan 


Blackmore 




Lorna Doom, Lippincott; Brock 
illustrations, Barse & Hopkins 


Dickens 




Little Dorr it, Oxford 


Davis 




Frair of Wittenberg, Macmillan 


Eliot 




Silas Marner, Oxford 


Thackeray 




Henry Esmond, American Book Co.; 
Macmillan 

FINE ARTS 


Charles H. 


Caffin 


How to Study Pictures, Century 


John C. Van Dyke 


How to Judge of a Picture, Jennings 






and Rye, Cincinnati 


Salomon Reinach 


Apollo, Scribner 



LIST OF BOOKS IN ANCIENT HISTORY 

A suggested list of books for reading of ninth and tenth grade stu- 
dents. These are for extensive reading. By courtesy of Mr. A. F. 
Barnard, of the University High School, Chicago University. 



Wells 

Clodd 
Ebers 
Maspero 

Baikie 
Mahaffy 

Homer 

Plutarch 
Davis 

Church 
Davis 
Robinson 
Mahaffy 

Church 

Preston and Dodge 



Outline of History, Macmillan ; One- 
volume edition 
Story of Primitive Man, Appleton 
Uarda, novel, Burt; Hurst 
Life in Ancient Egypt and Assyria, 

Appleton 
The Sea Kings of Crete, Macmillan 
Survey of Greek Civilization, 

Macmillan 
Iliad and Odyssey (source), 

Macmillan 
Lives (source), Dutton; Macmillan 
A Victor of Salamis (novel), 

Macmillan 
Stories from Herodotus, Merrill 
A Day in Old Athens, Allyn 
In the Days of Alcibiades, Longmans 
What Have the Greeks Done for 

Modern Civilization!, Putnam 
Stories from Livy, Dodd 
Life of the Romans* Sanborn. 



426 



READING AND LITERATURE 



How 

Church 

Boissier 
Oman 

Davis 

Champney 
Tucker 

Mau-Kelsey 

Lovell 



Hannibal and the Great War Between 

Rome and Carthage, Seeley, 

London 
Roman Life in the Days of Cicero t 

Dodd 
Cicero and his Friends, Putnam 
Seven Roman Statesmen of the Later 

Republic, Longmans 
A Friend of Caesar (novel), 

Macmillan, Grosset 
Romance of Imperial Rome, Putnam 
Life in the Roman World of Nero and 

St. Paul, Macmillan 
Pompeii: Its Life and Art, 

Macmillan 
Stories in Stone from the Roman 

Forum 2 . Macmillan 



Some Additional Books About Roman and Greek Life 
Edward L. White 



F. F. Abbott 

Fowler 

H. W. Johnston 

Hebermann 

Anne Allinson 

Lytton 

Felix Dahn 

Snedecker 

Bailey 



A ndivius Hedulio 

The Unwilling Vestal, Dutton 

Society and Politics in Ancient Rome, 

Scribner 
Social Life at Rome in the Days of 

Cicero, Macmillan 
Private Life of the Romans, Scott, 

Foresman 
Business Life in Ancient Rome, 

American 
Roads from Rome, Macmillan 

(out of print — mature) 
Last Days of Pompeii, Everyman's 

Library, Dutton 
A Captive of the Roman Eagles, 

McClurg (out of print) 
A Coward of Thermopylae, 

Doubleday (out of print) 



BOOKS IN BIOLOGY 4 

Plant Breeding 

Principles of 

Macmillan 



Fruit Growing, 



2 See an article on "A Course in Survey of Civilization for High Schools," in a 
forthcoming issue of School Review by A. F. Barnard. 

s By courtesy of Professor Frances E. Sabin of the University of Wisconsin. 

4 Prepared by Miss Lynda M. Weber, Department of Biology, Wisconsin High 
School, the University of Wisconsin, and included by her permission. See also Gen- 
eral Science Readings, Junior High School Lists. 



APPENDIX 



427 



CUVARD 

Darwin 

Downing 

Dugmore 

Eliot 

Emerton 

Fab re 

Harwood 

Howard 

Jewett 

Jordan and Kellogg 

Jordan and E verm an 

Kellogg 

Osborn 

Peckham 

Prudden 

Pyle 

Ritchie 

E. D. Sanderson 

Thayer 

Thompson 
Walker 

Wheeler 

T. M. Longstreth 

comstock and troland 

John Tyndall 
George Iles 
Sir Oliver Lodge 
R. H. Thurston 



The Migration of Birds, Cambridge 
Vegetable Mould and Earthworms, 

Appleton 
A Source-book of Biological Nature 

Study, Univ. of Chicago Press 
The Romance of the Beaver, 

Lippincott 
Caterpillars and their Moths, 

Century 
Common Spiders of the United States, 

Ginn 
Social Life in the Insect World, 

Bernard Miall translation, 

Century 
New Creations in Plant Life, 

Macmillan 
Insect Book, Doubleday 
The Next Generation, Ginn 
Animal Life, Appleton 
The Fish Book, American Food and 

Game Fishes, Doubleday 
American Insects, Holt 
Men of the Old Stone Age, Scribner 
Wasps, Social and Solitary, Houghton 
Dust and its Dangers, Putnam 
Manual of Personal Hygiene, 

Saunders 
Primer of Sanitation, World 

Book Co. 
Insect Pests of Farm, Garden '. and 

Orchard, ^John Wiley & Sons 
Concealing Coloration in the Animal 

Kingdom, Macmillan 
Biology of the Seasons, Holt 
On Birds and their Nestlings, 

American Book Co. 
Ants, Macmillan 

PHYSICS 1 

Reading the Weather, Outing Pub. 

Co. 
Nature of Matter and Electricity, 

D. Van Nostrand Co. 
Faraday as a Discoverer, Appleton 
Leading American Inventors, Holt 
Pioneers of Science, Macmillan 
Robert Fulton, Dodd 



1 The lists in physics and chemistry were prepared by Mr. E. R. Glenn, of the 
Lincoln School of Teachers College, New York, and included by his courtesy. 



428 



READING AND LITERATURE 



E. McCULLOUGH 

Silvanus P. Thompson 
William A. Durgin 
Charles R. Gibson 



Robert K. Duncan 
Bruno H. Burgel 
G. P. Serviss 

C. C. Turner 

D. C. Miller 

H. E. Ives 
T. O. Sloane 

R. A. Millikan 
J. A. Crowther 

C. R. Gibson 

A. Schuster and A. E. Shipley 

F. L. D arrow 



C. R. Gibson 



A. C. Lescarboura 

Sir Oliver Lodge 
F. A. Talbot 

C. A. E aland 

R. M. Yerkes 
Frederick Soddy 

F. A. Talbot 



M. M. P. Muir 
E. Roberts 
Benjamin Harrow 



Engineering as a Vocation, David 

Williams Co. 
Michael Faraday, his Life and Work, 

Macmillan 
Electricity, its History and Develop- 
ment, McClurg 
Scientific Ideas of Today 
Romance of Scientific Discovery 
Heroes of Science, Lippincott 
The New Knowledge, Barnes 
Astronomy for All, Cassell, London 
Astronomy with the Naked Eye, 

Harper 
Aircraft of Today, Lippincott 
Science of Musical Sounds, 

Macmillan 
Airplane Photography, Lippincott 
Liquid Air and the Liquefaction of 

Gases, Henley 
The Electron, Univ. of Chicago 
Life and Discoveries of Faraday, 

Macmillan 
Heroes of Science, Lippincott 
Britain's Heritage of Science 
Boy's Own Book of Great Inventions, 

Macmillan 
Scientific Ideas of Today 
Romance of Scientific Discovery, 

Lippincott 
Behind the Motion Picture Screen, 

Munn 
Pioneers of Science, Macmillan 
Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War, 

Lippincott 
Romance of the Microscope, 

Lippinott 
New World of Science, Century 
Matter and Energy, Holt 
Science and Life, Dutton 
All About the Treasures of the Earth, 

Cassell 

CHEMISTRY 

Heroes of Science, Chemists, Young 
Famous Chemists, Macmillan 
Eminent Chemists of Our Time, 

Van Nostrand 



APPENDIX 



429 



Ell wood Hendrick 

F. H. Newell 

F. P. Venable 

J. C. Brown 
E. Thorpe 

E. F. Smith 

F. J. Moore 

Lowry 

Emery Miller and Boynton 

L. J. Spencer 
J. C. Philip 

G. Martin 

R. K. Duncan 



Lassar-Cohn 
S. S. Sadtler 

W. S. Tower 
T. B. Wood 

A. Findlay 

J. B. Mannix 
F. A. Talbot 
T. H. Huxley 



A. W. Stewart 

G. Claude 

Bash are 

E. H. Richards 

R. M. Bird 



Opportunities in Chemistry, Century 
Everyman 's Chemistry, Harper 
Engineering as a Career % Van 

Nostrand 
A Short History of Chemistry, 

D. C. Heath 
History of Chemistry, Blakiston 
History of Chemistry, Putnam 
Chemistry in America, Appleton 
A History of Chemistry, McGraw- 
Hill 
Historical Introduction to Chemistry, 

Macmillan 
Applied Chemistry, Lyons & 

Carnahan 
The World's Minerals, Stokes 
Romance of Modern Chemistry, 

Lippincott 
Modern Chemistry and Its Wonders 
Triumphs and Wonders of Modern 

Chemistry, Van Nostrand 
The Chemistry of Commerce, 

Harper 
Some Chemical Problems of Today, 

Harper 
Chemistry in Daily Life, Grevel 
Chemistry of Familiar Things, 

Lippincott 
Story of Oil, Appleton 
Story of a Loaf of Bread, Cambridge 

Manual No. 58 
Chemistry in the Service of Man, 

Longmans 
Mines and Their Story, Lippincott 
Oil Conquest of the World, Lippincott 
Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews 
Lecture on a Piece of Chalk, 

Macmillan 
Chemistry and Its Borderland, 

Longmans 
Liquid Air, Oxygen, Nitrogen, 

Blakiston 
Sanitation of a Country House, Wiley 
Cost of Living Series, 4 Vol., Wiley 
Modern Science Reader, with Special 

Reference to Chemistry, Macmillan 



y 



430 



READING AND LITERATURE 



J. C. Philip 

Slosson 

TlLDEN 

R. B. PlLCHER 

F. Jones Butler 
T. Koller 

Jones 
Hearson 

C. R. Gibson 

Harrison Hale 
Hart and Smith 

U. S. DUSHMAN 

T. F. Thorpe 
W. A. Shenstone 
M. Faraday 

Oliver C. Farrington 

AND PlNCHOT 

BOOKS IN 
Caroline Hunt 

Ellen H. Richards 

Van Rensselaer 

Alice Morse Earle 

Esther Singleton 

Jean Broadhurst 

m. j. rosenau 
Anna J. Baldt 
Annabel Turner 
Community and National 



Achievements of Chemical Science, 

Macmillan 
Creative Chemistry, Century 
Chemical Discovery and Invention in 

the Twentieth Century 
What Industry Owes to Chemical 

Science, Van Nostrand 
Chemical Science 
Utilization of Waste Products, Scott, 

Greenwood 
New Era in Chemistry, Van Nostrand 
Iron and Steel, Spohn & 

Chamberlain 
Chemistry and its Mysteries, 

Lippincott 
American Chemistry, Van Nostrand 
Recent Discoveries in Inorganic 

Chemistry, Van Nostrand 
Chemistry and Civilziation, Richard 

G. Badger 
Humphrey Davy, Macmillan 
Justus von Liebig, Macmillan 
Chemical History of a Candle, 

Harper; Dutton 
Gems and Gem Minerals, A. W. 

Mumford, Chicago 

HOUSEHOLD ARTS l 

Life of Ellen H. Richards, 

Whitcomb & Barrows, Boston 
The Art of Right Living, Whitcomb 

& Barrows 
Manual of Home Making, Rose & 

Canon 
Home i Life in Colonial Days 
Two Centuries of Costume in America, 

Macmillan 
The Furniture of Our Forefathers, 

Doubleday 
Home and Community Hygiene, 

Lippincott 
The Milk Question, Houghton 
Clothing for Women, Lippincott 
A Study of Fabrics, Appleton 
Life, Leaflet 137, U. S. Bureau of 

Education 



1 By courtesy of Miss Florence Winchell, of the Lincoln School of Teachers 
College, New York. 



APPENDIX 



43i 



Matthews Textile Fibers, John Wiley & Sons, 

New York 
Business of the Household, Lippincott 
Mechanics of the Household, McGraw 
Household Arts for Home and 

School I and II, Macmillan 
Manual of Dietetics, Macmillan 
The Fundamental Basis of Nutrition, 

Yale 
The Newer Knowledge of Nutrition, 

Macmillan 
Boston Cooking School Cook Book, 

Little 
Food Industries, Chemical Pub. 
Co., Easton, Pa. 
Sherman Food Products, Macmillan 

Conn Bacteria, Yeasts and Molds in the 

Home, Ginn 
Refer also to the Publications of the U. S. Department of Agricul- 
ture and the Children's Bureau. 

FURTHER HOME ECONOMICS READINGS » 



Taber 

E. S. Keene 

cooley and spohr 

Rose 
Graham Lusk 

E. V. McCollum 

Fannie M. Farmer 

VULTE AND VANDERBILT 



KlNNE AND COOLEY 



Woolman and McGowan 

LlPPITT 

Farmers Bulletin 717, U. S. 
Rose 

Care of Children Series, 

Washington, D. C. 
Hunt 

Rolfe 

Balderston 

Vail 



M. T. Wellman 
Lucy Allen 
Greer 



Shelter and Clothing 

Clothing and Health 

Foods and Household Management, 

Macmillan 
Textiles, Macmillan 
Personal Hygiene and Home Nursing, 
World Book Co. 
Department of Agriculture. 

Food for Young Children 
Feeding the Family, Macmillan 
Children's Bureau, Dept. of Labor, 

School Lunches, Farmers Bulletin 

712, U.S. Dept. of Agriculture 
Interior Decoration for the Small 

Home, Macmillan 
Laundering, Pub. by Author, 1224 

Cherry St., Philadelphia, Pa. 
Approved Methods of Home 

Laundering, Procter & Gamble, 

Cincinnati, O. (Free) 
Food Study, Little, Brown 
Table Service, Little, Brown 
Textbook of Cooking, Allyn & Bacon ; 

new edition. 



By courtesy of Professor Bernice Dodge, of the University of Wisconsin. 



432 READING AND LITERATURE 

0. Powell Successful Canning and Preserving, 

Lippincott 
Willard and Gillett Dietetics for High Schools, 

Macmillan 

INDUSTRIAL ARTS AND VOCATIONAL GUIDANCE 
A Suggestive Reading List of Books for Junior and Senior High Schools. 1 

1. Selected readings on the opportunities for choice and success in 

important life callings. 

A. Suitable for general class use: — 

*S. S. Center The Worker and His Work, 

Lippincott 

* E. B . Gowin and W. A. Wheatley Occupations, Ginn K 

S. R. Hall How to Get a Position and How to 

Keep It, Funk, Wagnalls 
J. A. Lapp Learning to Earn, Bobbs- Merrill 

* O. S. Marden Choosing a Career, Bobbs-Merrill 
H. H. Moore The Youth and the Nation, 

Macmillan 

* Frank Parsons Choosing a Vocation, Houghton 

J. S. Stoddard and L. A. Yendes What Shall I Dot (50 profitable 

vocations), Hinds 
F. D. Twomby and J. C Dana The Romance of Labor, Macmillan 
*R. H.Rogers (Chapter I), Trade Foundations, 

Guy M. Jones 

B. Suitable as supplementary readings (Girls): — 

C. W. Alden Women's Ways of Earning Money, 

Barnes 
M. A. Laselle and K. E. Wiley Vocations for Girls, Houghton 

* A. F. Perkins Vocations for the Trained Woman, 

Longmans 

* E. W. Weaver Vocations for Girls, A. S. Barnes 

C. Suitable as supplementary readings (Boys): — 

* F. S. Harris The Young Man and His Vocation, 

Richard Badger 

* Whitelaw Reid Careers of Coming Men, Saalfield 
F. W. Rollins What Can a Young Man Dot 

Little, Brown 
E. W. Weaver Profitable Vocations for Boys, 

A. S. Barnes 
A. L. Bi shops and A. G. Keller Industry and Trade, Ginn 

1 Prepared under the direction of _ Professor A. H. Edgerton of the Department of 
Vocational Guidance, Indiana University — now of the Vocational Department. 
Detroit Public Schools. 



APPENDIX 



433 



II. Selected readings on the life careers of successful men and women. 
A. Suitable for general class use: — 



* Edward Bok 
Russell Conwell 

* Luther H. Gulick 

*F. W. Haskell 



*0. S. Marden 



Smiles 



Successward, Fleming H. Revell 
The New Day, Griffith & Rowland 
Mind and Work 
The Efficient Life, Doubleday 
The Man Who Didn't Know When 

He Had Failed, Carborundum 

Co., Niagara Falls 
Pushing to the Front, Success Co. 
Talks with Great Workers, 

Thomas Y. Crowell 
Josiah Wedgewood, Harper 



B. Suitable as supplementary readings (Girls) :— 

* E. C. Adams and W. D. Foster Heroines of Modern Progress, 

Sturgis & Walton 

* S. K. Bolton Girls Who Became Famous, 

Crowell 
Famous Leaders Among Women 
Crowell 

* Mrs. H. Fawcett Some Eminent Women, Macmillan 
B. B. Gilchrist Life of Mary Lyon, Houghton 

G. H. Palmer Life of Alice Freeman Palmer, 

Houghton 

C. Suitable as supplementary readings (Boys) : — 



A. J. Beveridge 

Jones 

*G. H. Lorimer 

William A. 

and Arthur M. Mowry 

* E. Wild 

* H. S. Williams 



The Young Man and The World, 

D. Appleton 
Thomas A. Edison, Crowell 
Letters from a Self- Made Merchant 

to His Son, Small, Maynard 
American Inventions and Inven- 
tors, Silver Burdett 
Famous Leaders of Industry, Boston 
The Wonders of Science in Modern 
Life Series, Funk, Wagnalls 



III. Selected readings and references on important occupations. 
A. Agriculture: — 

E. O. Dean 
L. H. Bailey 

* Burkett, Stevens, and Hill 
L. C. Corbett 

F. W. DeLancey 



Peter Henderson 

28 



Opportunities in Farming, Harper 
Training of Farmers, Macmillan 
Agriculture for Beginners, Ginn 
Garden Farming, Ginn 
Down-to-Date Poultry Knowledge, 

Poultry Fancier Pub. Co. 
Practical Floriculture, Orange- Judd 



434 



READING AND LITERATURE 



*T. F. Hunt 
C. S. Plumb 

H. E. Van Normal 

* H. J. Walters 
G. C. Watson 
F. A. Waugh 



The Young Farmer, Orange- Judd 
Types and Breeds of Farm Animals, 

Ginn 
First Lessons in Dairying, 

Orange-Judd 
Essentials of Agriculture, Ginn 
Farm Poultry, Macmillan 
Beginners 1 Guide to Fruit Growing, 

Orange-Judd 



B. Commercial Occupations: 

* F.J.Allen 

* N. A. Brisco 
Miles M. Dawson . 



Business Employment, Ginn 
Economics of Business, Macmillan 
The Business of Life Insurance, 

A. S. Barnes 
Practical Salesmanship, Little 
The Making of a Merchant 
Elements of Business Law, Ginn 
Elements of Accounting, D. Appleton 
* A. Phelps and Andrew Carnegie Transaction of Business and How 

to Win a Fortune, Forbes 
Practical Real Estate Methods, 

West Side Y. M. C. A., New York 
Work of Wall Street, D. Appleton 
Essential Elements of Business 

Character, F. H. Re veil 
Money and Banking, Ginn 



N. C. Fowler, Jr. 
H. N. Higgenbotham 
Ernest W. Huffcut 
F. J. Klein 



Thirty Real Estate Experts 

S. S. Pratt 

* Herbert G. STOCKwell 



Horace White 

C. Transportation:— 
Nelson Collins 

C. F. Carter 

E. R. Dewsnup 

J. S. Eaton 

Electric Railway 

Transportation 
E. R. Johnson 

T. G. McPherson 
W..Z. Ripley 

D. Civil Service: — 
E. B. K. Foltz 



Opportunities in Merchant Ships, 

Harper 
When Railroads were New, 

Henry Holt 
Railway Organization and Working, 

Univ. of Chicago Press 
Education for Efficiency in Railroad 

Service, U. S. Bulletin, No. 420 
Annals of American Academy of 

Science, Philadelphia 
Ocean and Inland Transportation, 

D. Appleton 
Working-of 'a Railroad, Henry Holt 

Railway Problems, Ginn 

Federal Civil Service as a Career, 
Putnam 



APPENDIX 



435 



J. R. Garfield 

Manual of Examinations , 

E. Manufacturing: — 
E. P. Cheney 



John Leitch 
Frederick Taylor 



Chas. Toothaker 

W. H. TOLMAN 
J. R. WlLDMAN 

A. Williams 

Andrew Carnegie 

F. Building Trades: 
J. Arrowsmith 

John Black 
Geo. B. Clow 

W. S. B. Dana 



Paul N. Hasluck 

F. T. Hodgson 

Chas. King 

Wm. Noyes 
Herbert Pratt 
Wm. A. Radford 



G. Machine and Related Trades: 
Joseph H. Adams 

John L. Bacon 
I. M. Chase 
Colvin and Stanley 
Alfred Compton 



Public Service, Vol. VI, Young 
Folks' Library, Hall & Locke 

U. S. Civil Service Commission, Wash., D. C. 



Social and Industrial History of 

England, Macmillan 
Man to Man, B. C. Forbes 
Principles of Scientific Management, 

Harper 
Commercial Raw Materials, Ginn 
Social Engineering, McGraw-Hill 
Cost Accounting, Business Book 

Bureau 
How It Is Made, Thos. Nelson & 

Sons 
The Empire of Business, Doubleday 

The Paper Hanger's Companion, 

Wm. Comstock 
Masonry, Sampson 
Practical Up-To-Date Plumbing, 

Hodgson 
A Primer of Architectural Drawing 

for Young Students, Wm. 

Comstock 
Practical Painter's Work, W. T. 

Comstock 
Practical Bricklaying and Stone 

Masonry Self-Taught, Hodgson 
Constructive Carpentry, Inside Fin- 
ishing, American Book Co. 
Wood and Forest, Manual Arts Press 
Wiring a House, N. W. Henley 
Cement Houses and How to Build 

Them, Wm. Comstock 
Practical Carpentry, Radford Arch. 

Co. 

Harper's Machinery Book for Boys, 

Harper 
Elementary Forge Practice, Wiley 
The Art of Patternmaking, Wiley 
Machine Shop Primer,, McGraw 
First Lessons in Metal Working, 

Wiley 



436 



READING AND LITERATURE 



A. L. Dyke 

R. H. Palmer 
LaVerne W. Spring 

Smith 

Atkins 

W, H. Tolan and A. W. Guthrie 

MacFarlane 

H. Engineering Professions: — ■ 

DWIGHT GODDARD 



Ell wood Hendrick 
T. O. Sloane 

Wm. Archibald 

I. Learned Professions: — ■ 
C. W. Bardeen 

A. L. Bostwick 

Brewster 

John Campbell 

J. L. Given 

H. F. Harrington and 
T. Frankenberg 
J. N. Larned 

J. M. Lee 

E. E. Slosson 

J. Other Openings: — 
SirW. DeW.Abney 



Automobile Encyclopedia, Motor 
Vehicle Pub. Co. 

Foundry Practice, Wiley 

Non-technical Chats on Iron and 
Steel, Stokes 

Principles of Machine Work, Indus- 
trial Education Book Co. 

Practical Sheet and Plate Metal T! - or\ 

Hygiene for the Worker. American 

Iron and Steel Manufacture 



Handbook for Civil Engineers 
Handbook for Concrete Engineers 
Handbook for Electrical Engineers 

N. W. Henley 
Opportunities in Chemistry, Harper 
How to Become a Successful 

Electrician, Henley 
Hoiv It Is Done 
How It Works, Sully & Kleinteich 



Teaching as a Business, C. W. 

Bardeen 
The American Public Library, 

D. Appleton 
Vocational Guidance for the 

Professions, Rand 
Lives of the Chief Justices, 

Thompson Co. 
The Making of a Newspaper, 

Henry Holt 
Essentials in Journalism, Ginn 

Books, Culture and Character, 

Houghton 
Opportunities in the Newspaper 

Business, Harper 
Great American Universities, 

Macmillan 



Instructions in 
Lippincott 



Photography, 



APPENDIX 



43 7 



G. B. Affleck 



E. G. Cheney 

Glenn H. Curtiss and 

August Post 
Charles A. Ell wood 

G. C. Loening 
R. C. Morriss 



Paul Nathan 



Gress 



United Typothetae of America 
Dept. of Education, Chicago. 
Russel Sage Foundation 
E. J. Ward 



Bibliography of Physical Training 
and Hygiene, American Physical 
Education Association, Spring- 
field, Massachusetts 

Scott Burton, Forester, Appleton 

Curtiss Aviation Book, F. A. 
Stokes 

Sociology and Modern Social 
Problems, American Book Co. 

Monoplanes and Biplanes, Munn 

History of the Y.M.C.A., 
Association Press, New York 

How To Make Money in the 
Printing Business, Oswald 
Pub. Co., New York 

American Handbook of Printing, 
Oswald 

Practial Apprenticeship for Printers, 

Social Work, New York 

The Social Center, D. Appleton 



INDEX 



Abbott, Allan and Trabue, M. R. : "A Measure of Ability to Judge 
Poetry," 54 ff., 61, 143, 218 f., 249. 

Abbott, Allan: "An Experiment in High-School Reading," 236; on 
the teacher of English as a vaudeville artist, 246. 

Ability in Reading, finding pupils' exact level of, 140 ff. ; tests versus 
observation and opinion, 140 f., actual findings of standard tests, 
141 ff., 149 ff., 161, 171. 

Absurdity, enjoyment of, by children, 83 ff., 97 f . ; for a time out- 
grown, 97, 108 ff. 

Absolute rather than relative improvement, greater desirability of, 
150 ff. ; as a stimulus to purpose, 150 f., 177, 194. 

Achievement against odds and dangers, satisfaction of, 91 ff. ; the ideal 
of, 120 ff. ; informed with a perception of social good, 121 ff. 

Adolescence (G. Stanley Hall), 77. 

Adult interests in reading, mistakenly intruded on children, 102; 
beginning of, 112. 

Adventure, children's love of bloody and violent, 83 f., 88 ff., 265. 

Aids to reading, in editorial equipment of books, 180, 182 ff. 

Aim, see Purpose. 

Aladdin, eighth-grade play, setting for, 305. 

Allusions, good and bad treatment of, 213 ff. 

Analysis in curious detail, the bane of literature-teaching, 216 ff. ; 
versus constructive and creative approach, 200 ff., 217 ff., 220 ff., 
243 ff., 258 f., 278 ff. 

Analysis, in reading or study, should follow getting fundamental idea 
of paragraph, chapter, etc., 178 ff. ; emphasized in reading in the 
senior high school, 198; matter of reading, not of composition 
or of literature-study, 212 ff. 

Andrea del Sarto, teaching of, 229 f. 

Annotated and introduced texts, evils vs. possible good of, 212 ff., 
241 ff., 246 f. ; reasons for stupidly thorough editing, 213 ff. ; 
harmful results of, 217 ff. 

Appreciation of art, 243 f. 

Appreciation of Literature, wrong attempts to extort, 242 f ., 255 ff., 
261; suitable repression of too-exuberant, 246; demands a fund 
of first-hand experiences, 203, 231 ff., 243 ff., and an "aptitude for 
vicariousness," 61; need of a place in school for, 138 f., 199; 
class help toward, 203 ff., 207 ff., 227 ff., 232 f . ; uses of compo- 
sition for developing, 262, 278 ff. 

439 



44 o INDEX 

Appreciation of One's Own Experience, the major value and 
contribution of literature, 17, 42 ff. ; denned as weighing or valu- 
ing, 49 f . ; significance or creative insight vs. the trite ant trivial 
as contributing to, 46 ff. ; need for place in school for ejecting, 
138 f., 199 ff- 

Appreciation of poetry, Abbott-Trabue tests of, 54 ff., 6*, 143, 
218 f., 249. 

" Apprehending " literature, 202 ; class help in, 203 ff., 207 ff., 227 ff. ; 
through realizing or " sensing ", 232 ff. ; testing " apprehen- 
sion ", 277. 

Approach to difficult literature, 209 ff., 241 ff. ; critical versus creative, 
257 ff., 255 ff. See also Backgrounds and Introductions. 

"Aptitude for vicariousness " (Palmer) needed for apprehending 
literature, 61. 

Apuleius : Golden Book — Story of Cupid and Psyche, 22. 

Arnold, Matthew, on the purpose of literature, 42 ; on " touch- 
stones of poetry ", 123. 

Art, an ideal course in, 243 f . ; contribution of, to realizing literature, 
*37> 243 f ., 254 f . ; only excellent art to be used, 254 f . 

Assembly programs, dramatization for, 289 ff., 302 ff. 

"Assimilative Reading, the teaching of," (R. L. Lyman), 168, 
183, 198. 

Attention-getting, the satisfaction of, 93. 

Aydelotte, Frank, on " infant criticism," 264. 

Ayers-Burgess Tests of Silent Reading, 145. 

Attitude or " mind-set ", fundamental importance of, 76 i., 168, 
172 ff., 176 ff., 241 ff., 254; of approach to the classics, 255 ff. 

Bachman, F. P., "Quality versus Quantity in the Subject-Matter of 
Instruction," cited, 128. 

Backgrounds and Approaches to literature, 208, 241 ff. ; providing 
the essential, 251 ff. 

Bacon, Francis, Of Studies, quoted, 173. 

Baker, Franklin T., on attitude of approach as determinative, 254; 
Introduction to "A Bibliography of Children's Reading," 137, 
371; in Carpenter, Baker, and Scott: The Teaching of English, 
179, 214, 229 ; "High-School Reading, Compulsory and Voluntary," 
257; on selection of literature for children, 125, 137, 257, 339; 
"Shakespeare in the Schools," 68; "The Teacher of English," 
60, 125 ; on " What " vs. " Why " in children's reports on litera- 
ture read, 265. 

Baldwin, C. S., on classifications of figures of speech, 67. 

Ballads, singing or reading aloud vs. studying, 249 f . ; approach 
to, 254. 

Bamberger, Florence, Influence of the Physical Make-up of a Book 
upon Children's Selection, (note) 206. 



INDEX 441 

Barbusse, Henri: Under Fire (Le Feu), no. 

Barrie, James : Alice Sit-by-the-Fire, cited, 30, 99, 113. 

Bases .df Children's Literary Interests, in original nature, 88 ff. 

BaudeEire, Charles, Poems in Prose, cited, (note) 62. 

Begin ing Where Children Really Are, in experiences and inter- 
est, 75 ff. ; in appreciation of books, 80, 256, in order to sub- 
stitute better books of like appeal, 101 ff., 123 ft*. ; in power to 
read, 138 ff. 

Bennett, Arnold, Literary Taste and How to Form It, 61 f . ; Clay- 
hanger, 113, 244; Old Wives' Tales, 46, 113; The Feast of St. 
Friend (Friendship and Happiness), 116; The Title, 46. 

Bible, as literature, 52; introductions to the Old Testament narratives, 
(C. S. Pendleton), 253. 

Bindings, effect of (Miss Bamberger's study), (note) 206. 

Biography, its use and abuse, (Hayward cited), 69 f., 214 f. 

Blenchley, Robert, in Life, quoted, 48. 

Bobbitt, Franklin, The Curriculum, quoted, 16, 136, 212, 370. 

Book Clubs, or Reading Clubs (W. S. Hinchman), 203 ff . ; books 
for, 205 f.; continuance of, 235 f . ; keeping reading-records in, 
236, 262 ff. 

Book-notes and reports, composition of, 236, 262 ff. ; outline for, 223 f ., 
266 f . ; files of, 264 ff. ; examples of, from grades and high 
school, 266 ff. 

Books, editorial apparatus in, making use of, 180 ff. See also Anno- 
tated Editions. 

Books for School Libraries, lists of (E. R. Glenn's study), 131 ff. 

Books recommended to children, undesirable, 86; how to introduce 
better, 101 ff., 203 f . ; selections for reading clubs, 204 ff. ; for 
primary grades, 106 ff. 

Books with Values as Subject Matter, 126 ff . ; criteria for choosing, 
128 ff. ; lists of, described, 130 f. 

Boy Scouts, lists of books for, 105 f . ; title used without authorization 
of the Scouts (note), 105. 

Briggs, T. H., cited, 170. 

Broadening of first-hand experience through literature, 19 ff., 243 ff. 

Brooke, Rupert, " The Great Lover," quoted, 62. 

Brown, H. A. : Measurement of the Ability to Read, 144 ; graphs from, 
presented, 148 ff. ; standards in rate of silent reading, (1916), 152. 

Brown, R. W. : How the French Boy Learns to Write (Explica- 
tion), 250. 

Browning, Robert, " Fra Lippo Lippi," cited (note), 47; "Andrea del 
Sarto," 229 f . ;■" Development," quoted, 293. 

Bulfinch : The Age of Fable, 22, 52, 253. 

Bunner, H. C, "The Tenor," in Short Sixes, 113. 

Bunyan : Pilgrim s Progress, 52 ; an introduction to, 253. 

Burgess, May Ayers, Tests of Silent Reading, 145. 



442 INDEX 

Campagnac, E. C : The Teaching of Composition, 202, 260. 

Canby and Others: English Composition (Dr. MacCracken cited), 128. 

Canfield (Fisher), Dorothy, Understood Betsy, quoted, 209 ft". 

Captains Courageous (Kipling), 19, 20; book-note on, 271. 

" Carl and His Friends," a third-grade play (Miss Maloney) 295 ff. 

Cause and Effect of motives and actions, true picturing of, 31 ff., 

50, 223. 
Central idea, in learning to read, 178 f . ; discovering relation of 

supporting details to, 180 f., to follow mastery of, 198; in literary 

works, 212, 217 ff., 225 ff., 233, 239, 272, 275. 
Certain, C. C. : " Report of the Committee on Library Organization 

and Equipment, 134, 185 ; on library-reference study, 185. 
Chance, luck, and the favor of the gods, dangers of cultivating belief 

in, 34 ff., 109. 
Character, interest in, lacking in small children, 97; appears first in 

the high-school age, 98 ff., 112 ff. 
" Chewing and digesting ", or reading in detail, 173, 175 ff. ; necessity 

for purpose in, 176 ff. ; vs. " apprehending " literature, 212 ff. 
Children, in literature, 78 ff. ; in pedagogical books, 77; in real life, 

the best way of knowing, 78 f . ; need of knowing, 77. 
Children's Demands upon literature, the growth of, 80 ff., 98 ff., 

101 ff., 112 ff. 
Children's Experiences and Interests, Beginning with, 75 ff., 

80 ff. ; bases of, in original nature, 88 ff. ; literature must appeal 

to immediate, 75, 83, 102 ff. ; substituting better material with like 

appeal, 86, 101, 123 ff. 
Children's Interests, Types of Excellent Literature Within, 

101 ff. 
Children's Interests in Reading (A. M. Jordan's study), 80 ff., 93, 

109 f., 112; (Miss Porter's study), 83. 
Children's unguided reading, nature of, 80 ff. ; dangers of, 83 ff., 86. 
Children's Own Attempts at Literature, 79, 262 ff. ; examples of, 

266 ff. ; value of, for learning to know children, 79. 
Choices of Reading Matter, Children's Actual, 80 ff. ; dangers of, illus- 
trated, 83 ff. ; bases of, in original nature, 88 ff. ; necessity of 

beginning in knowledge of, 75 f., 123 ff., 256. 
Churchill, Winston, The Crisis, quoted, 25 f. 
" Circulatory volubility," (Quintilian), 158. 
Class Help in " Apprehending " Literature, 200 ff., 227 f ., 232 f ., 

244 f . ; in book clubs, 203 ff. ; in grasping " images " and central 

idea, 224 ff. 
Classic and Modern Literature for children's reading, 122 ff. 
Classics, a right attitude of approach to, 125 ff., 255 ff. 
Classifications of literature, major, value for teachers especially, 

65 ff. ; based on what the author is trying to do, 65 ff., 222 ff. 
Coleridge, The Ancient Mariner, 226, 232. 



INDEX 443 

Comments by teachers on literature read, good and bad, 247 ff., 250. 

Commonplace, pleasures of, source of enjoyment in current litera- 
ture, 89. 

Competition, personal vs. impersonal, 150 f . ; social, 151; absolute vs. 
relative gains, 151, 177, 194- 

Composition, Uses of in Teaching Literature, 208, 262. ff., 277 ff. 

Comprehension in Reading, as revealed by tests, 140 ff. ; as affected 
by conventional instruction, 156 ff . ; not well tested by memory 
questions, 144. 

Comradeship, wholesome, its basis in pity and mothering, 95 ff., and 
in unripe love-interest, 112 ff . ; its growth in reason and sym- 
pathy, 114 ff. ; requires constant, vigorous attempts at mutual 
understanding, 116. 

Conclusions, see Interpretations, Insight. 

" Concrete abundance " of detail requisite in book reports, 264. 

Conrad, Joseph, Lord Jim, cited, 119. 

Constructive vs. analytical approach to literature, 202, 216 ff., 220 ff., 
246 f ., 258 f ., 278 ff. ; harm of over-analysis, 217 ff. 

Contemporary literature, valued for timeliness, 46, 89 ; not obstructed 
by commentary and annotation, 247; teachers' choices of, 52 ff. 

Context, the best clue to word-meanings, 160 ff. ; try, test, and revise 
meanings to fit, 162 f. 

Conventional Methods in Teaching Reading, failure of, 156 ff. 

Cook, H. Caldwell : The Play Way, cited, 202, 305. 

Cooperation of teachers in all subjects, in selecting literature, 127 ff. ; 
in teaching pupils how to study, 189; in providing backgrounds 
for literature, 254 ff. ; in working upon dramatizations, 305, 306 ff. 

Cost and Labor of English Teaching (Hopkins report), cited 
(note), 58. 

Courage, realization of, vs. mock-heroics, 91 ff., 108 ff., no. 

Course, in Silent Reading, plan for, 197 ff. ; in literature, selecting 
books for, 123 ff., 339. 

Courtis, S. A., on testing reading by reproduction, 143 ; on value and 
dangers of tests, 149; Reading Scales, Form 2, 144 ff . ; standards 
in comprehension and in speed of reading, 151 f . ; "Measurement 
of Classroom Products," cited, 143, 145'. 

Crane, Stephen, The Red Badge of Courage, no. 

Creative vs. critical approach to literature, without conscious purpose, 
202, 216 ff., 220 ff., 246 f., 258 f., 278 ff.; aided by the use of 
composition, 208, 262 ff., 277 ff. 

Creative Insight, see Insight. 

Crisis, The (Churchill), quoted, 25 f. 

Criteria of Literary Excellence: Realizableness, Truth, Significance, 
17 ff., 30 ff., 42 ff., 50; necessity of, for teachers, 51 ff., 70; chil- 
dren's attempts to apply, 96 ff., 108 ff. 

Critical vs. Creative approach to literature, 202, 216 ff., 220 ff., 246 f., 
258 f ., 278 ff. ; the demonstrable harm of, 217 ff., 258 f . 



444 INDEX 

Criticism, true and false, in children's book-reports, 264 ff. ; of oral 

reading by children, 193. 
Crothers, Samuel McChord, " The Mission of Humor " quoted, 45 ; 

"The Enjoyment of Poetry" cited, 66, 219 f. 
" Cultivation of the Emotions," 22 ff. ; vs. the emotional short-circuit, 

23, ^ 95 ff-, 114 f- 
" Curious " and analytical reading, its abuse, 174 ; the right place and 

proper attack, 175 ff., 178; necessity of purpose for, 176 f. 
Curiosity, the stirrings of, helping to evaluate in reading, 220 ff. ; 

stopping to explore significant by-paths, 219 ff. ; vs. irrelevant and 

harmful attention to detail, 212 ff., 229 ff. ; as to writer's purpose, 

significant and fruitful, 221 ff. 
Current literature, Teachers' choices of, 52 ff. 
Curriculum, The (Bobbitt), quoted, 16, 136, 212, 338. 
Curse of irrelevant details and information, 212 ff., 217 ff., 229 ff. 

Danger, terror, and achievement against odds, satisfactions of, 91 ff. 
Dell, Floyd, Were You Ever a Child? cited, 103, 243 f. 
Democracy and Education (Dewey), cited, 17 f., 49, 77, 136. 
De Quincey, " the literature of knowledge and the literature of power," 

42, 66. 
Details, irrelevant vs. significant, 212 ff., 219, 229 ff. ; over-attention 

to, 175, 212 ; harm of, 217 ff. ; sensory, essential to realization of 

literature, 219, 231 ff. 
Dewey, John: Democracy and Education, cited, 17 f., 49, 77, 136; The 

School and Society, 77; Reconstruction in Philosophy, 31. 
"Diagnostic Measurements as a Basis of Procedure," (Zirbes), 171. 
Dictionary, superstitious abuse of, 156, 158 ff. ; its proper use, 160 ff. 
Disrespect for law, literature propagating, 117 f. 
Dramatic reading in elementary and high schools, 293 ff., 301 ff. ; of 

dramatic material only, 302. 
Dramatization, Educational, and Dramatic Reading, 208, 289 ff. ; 

pupil's own, vs. teacher-dictated, 289, 302 ff. ; settings for, 303 ff. ; 

values of, 290, 301, 331 ff. 
Dramatizing, inner, of experience, 88, 289. 
Drills, good, stimulated by definite tests and graphs of scores, 

150 f., 177. 
Drinkwater, John, on matter ~nd manner, (note) 71. 
Dumas fils, on matter and manner as inseparable, 71. 
Dunsany, "The Puritan," 38; "The Raft," 64, from Fifty-One Tales. 

Eastman, Max: The Enjoyment of Poetry, 61, 66, 97. 

Eaton, Anne T., a test in library reference, 184. 

Editions with notes and introductions, stupid and harmful, 212 ff., 
215 f., 229, 242 f., 246 f.; bad results of, 217 ff. ; essentials of 
good, 214 f ., 216, 219 f . ; helps supplied by, 183. 

Editorial apparatus of well-edited books, making use of, 18b; help 
supplied by, 183. 

Editorial work by fifth-grade pupils (Miss Tall), 182. 



INDEX 445 

Educational Dramatization and Dramatic Reading, 208, 289 ff. ; 
must be pupils', not teacher's or coach's, 302 f . ; values of, 289, 
301, 33i. 

Educational Principles, Three Fundamental, 75 ff., 86 ff., 138 ff., 
172 ff., 176 f., 193 ff. 

Educational Psychology (E. L. Thorndike), 78, 90, 91, 92, 94. 05, 115, 
no. 151. [93 ff. ; (Norsworthy and Whitley), yy. 

Effects of Thought and Action. Truth to. 30 ff.. 50. 

Eliot, George: Silas Marner, 113, 225, 244, 248, 302; Adam Bede, 
113; The Mill on the Floss, 32, 39, 113. 

Elizabethan life and playhouses, an introduction to, 251 ff. 

Emerson, Self -Reliance, quoted, 96. 

Emotions, cultivation of, 22 ff., 114 f., vs. the maudlin emotional 
short-circuit, 23, 63; without significant value in experience 
unless stirred by sensory experience or its recollection, 24, 26 f., 
242 f. ; false, in children's books, 84 f . ; conventions of, rooted 
in instinct, 95 f. 

Empirical Studies in School Reading (J. F. Hosic) quoted, 217 f. 

English Composition as a Social Problem, cited, (note), 179. 

Enhancement of Experience, the purpose of literature; see Apprecia- 
tion, Insight, Enrichment of Experience. 

Enjoyment of literature, based in original nature, 88 ff. See also 
Appreciation, Apprehending Literature. 

Enjoyment of Poetry, The (Eastman), 61, 66, 97; (Crothers), 61, 219 f 

Enrichment of Experience Through Literature, The, 17 ff., 42 ff., 
64 f., 101 ff., 138 f., 200 ff., 219. 

Enthusiasm, deliberate pumping-up of, 23, 63, 95 f . ; see Emotions. 

Equipment for teaching literature: literary — actual, 51 ff. ; how to 
improve, 57 ff . ; educational, 75 ff. 

Etymology, its use and abuse, 156, 158 ff. 

Evaluation, not neglect, of the stirrings of curiosity, dislike, sympathy 
in reading literature, 219 ff. ; help in this a problem of literature 
classes, 220 ff . ; of our own experience, a chief good of litera- 
ture, 42 ff., 49 ff. 

Examination into the Teaching of Reading, An, 138 ff. 

Examinations in Literature, 262, 274 ff. ; examples of, 276 f . 

Excellent Literature within Children's Interests, Types of, 
101 ff. 

Experience, defined (Dewey), 17 f. ; realization of, the aim of school 
courses in literature, as of all literature, 17, 256; new, through 
literature, 17, 19 ff. ; vs. unrealized statements, 21 ff., 128 ff., 242 f ., 
246 f . ; dependence on first-hand contacts with life, 18 f ., 59, 61 ff. ; 
its recall pleasant, 18, 24 — even the painful softened, 46; and 
emotion, 22 ff., 30. 



446 INDEX 

Experience, The Appreciation of, 17, 27 ff., 42 if., 46, 64 ff., 101 ff., 
219; need of a place for, in schools, 138, 200 ff . ; everything in 
literature classes should contribute to this, 209 ff., 246 f., vs. false 
analysis, 202, 217 ff., 220 f., 246 f., 258 f., 278 f. ; more significant 
than appreciation of literature, which is a by-product, 17, 42 ff. ; 
definition of appreciation, 49. 

Experience, Beginning with Children's Actual, 17 ff., 75 ff., 
86 ff., 101 ff. 

Experience, first-hand, 18 ff. ; necessary for apprehending experience 
in literature, 18, 89, 203, 231 ff., 241 ff . ; at second-hand, through 
books, 18 ff., but only details of previous experiences can appear, 
in more or less original combinations, 18, 20, 30; power of imagi- 
native recombination or " vicarious experiencing " also necessary, 
and to be cultivated, 20, 61 ; failure of attempts to " short-circuit ", 
23, 63, 95 f.; inseparable from true emotion, 22, ff., 30; essential, 
for teachers particularly, 61 ff. 

Experience of Excellent Literature, need for in schools, 138, 
200 ff. ; teachers' need for, 51 ff., 64 ff. 

Experience, Truth to, 30 ff. ; versus factual accuracy, 30 f. ; vs. 
happy ending, luck, and theories of justice, 33 ff . ; difficulty and 
necessary incompleteness of attempts to secure, 32. 

Explication in French and American schools, 250. 

Eye-movement in reading, relation to speed and therefore to compre- 
hension, 148, 169; how to improve, 169 f. 

Facts and opinions, distinguishing, 188 ff . ; parallel distinction between 
"images and ideas", 224 ff. 

A. H. R. Fairchild: The Teaching of Poetry, cited, 27, 137, 229 f. 

Fantasy and Faery in folk-tales, 33 ff-5 harmless disregard of truth 
to experience, provided we recognize it as fantastic, 33 ff . ; an inse- 
cure refuge from life, 40 f. ; children's love for, 89 f ., 96 ff., 106 f. 

Fay and Eaton: The Use of Books and Libraries, cited (note), 184. 

Feathertop, a ninth-grade dramatization, 313 ff. 

Felmley, David, " The Source of Supply of Teachers," cited (note), 54. 

Figures of speech, comparisons, direct or implied, 67; further classifi- 
cations unimportant, at least in high school, 203. 

Folk-Tales and Myths, children's love for, 96 ff., 106; impossibilities 
relished, 89, 96 f . ; modern stories in the genuine tradition, 106 f. ; 
for a time outgrown, 97 f., 108 ff. 

Foundation of genuine experience, essential to apprehending literature, 
18 ff., 89, 203, 231 ff., 241 ff. ; particularly necessary for teachers 
of literature, 61 ff. 

Frost, Robert, Mountain Interval, 44. 

Fry, Emma Sheridan, on values of Educational Dramatics, 333. 

"Functional" Tests (W. W. Hatfield), cited, 274. 



INDEX 447 

Galsworthy, John, Justice, 39, «4J The Fugitive, 114; The Inn of 

Tranquillity, 40, 4 6 ; A Commentary, 46. 
Gettysburg Address, The, experience necessary for apprehending, 28 ; 

a stage-setting for, 307 ff. 
Gibbs, Philip: Now it Can Be Told and More that Must be Told, 

no, 187. 
" Glad Books," 33 ff., 37- 
Glenn, E. R. : " High-School Library Book Selection," 131 ff. ; tables 

from, 132-5'. . 

Grammar, use and abuse of, in understanding what is read, 150 ff. ; 

tentative report of English Council committee cited (note), 157. 
Graphs, value in making clear to pupils their status and gains in skill, 

150 ff., 177; illustrative, 131-5, 148 ff- 
Gray, W. S. : Studies of Elementary School Reading through Stan- 
dardised Tests, 143 f ., 152, 191 ; " Relation of Silent Reading to 

Economy of Time in Education," 170. 
Greek myths and epics, 22, 52, 108; introductions to, 253. 
Guessing intelligently, method of learning meaning of words in 

context, 162 f. 

Habits in reading, finding what ones to form, 165 ff., 195 f. ; deter- 
mining efficient order of establishment, 195 f. 
"Habits of Harmless Enjoyment," (S. C. Parker), 98. 
" The Happy Ending," Nation editorial quoted, 33 ; desire for, rein- 
forced by trust in luck and belief in " poetic " justice, 33 ff. 
Hardy, Thomas, 38. 

Hatfield, W. W. : " Functional " Tests, 274. 
Hawkes, Clara N. : "Outside Reading," cited (note), 129. 
Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter, 39, 41. 

Hayward, F. L. : The Lesson in Appreciation, cited, 69, 214 f., 243 f. 
Hero-Worship, the satisfaction in, 94 ; values, if presented in true and 

worthy ideal and translated into action, 119 f. 
Robert Herrick, The Common Lot, 120. 
"High-School Library Book Selection," (Glenn), 131 ff. 
Hinchman, W. S., quoted, 127; on Reading Clubs, 203 ff . ; classification 

of writer's purpose, 223 f . ; outline for book-notes, 266 f . 
History of literature, conventional, 237 ; an examination into major 

interpretations of experience expressed in books, 236 ff. 
Hodgson, Elizabeth, on attitude of approach to the classics, 257. 
Hopkins Report on " Cost and Labor of English Teaching " cited, 

58, 359- e 
Horace, Epistles cited, 123. 
Horn, Ernest, quoted, 250 ; " Selection of Silent- Reading Textbooks," 

138 f. 
Hosic, J. F., quoted, 136, 178; Empirical Studies in School Reading, 

quoted, 217 f. 



44 3 INDEX 

Housman, Laurence, on " Reality in Poetry," cited, 66. 
How to Read (Kerfoot) cited, 18, 20, 88, 160 f., 163, 220 f. 
Hudson, W. W., Far Away and Long Ago, cited, 102, 204. 
Humor, a perspective worth cultivating, 45 — Charles Lamb cited and 
Dr. Cr others quoted, 45. 

Ibsen, Peer Gynt and Rosmersholm cited, 118. 

Ideals in Literature, a highest purpose and value, 114 ff., 116 ff. ; but 
they must be truly presented, to square with experience, 95 f., 117 
ff. ; false ideals illustrated, 95 f., 117; distortion by moralizers and 
thesis-mongers, 33 ff. ; of genuine achievement, 119 ff. ; their 
transference into action, requires habit-forming acts, 118 ff. ; these 
possible in a truly social classroom, 119 ff. 

Ideas, see Interpretations. 

Illustrated editions, 137, 206, 254 f., 260; harmful if poor, 255. 

"Images and Ideas" — objective and interpretive writings, 224 ff. ; 
parallels distinction between facts and opinions, 188 ff. 

Imagination, not necessarily fantastic and unreal, 20, 33 ff. ; need in 
reconstructing pages of geography or history, 128 ff. ; must build 
on materials of previous experience, 18 ff., 89, 203, 231 ff., 243 f. 

Imitation, assigned vs. genuine, 277 ff. 

Improvement in Reading, absolute vs. relative, 150 ff. ; relation to real 
purpose, 172 ff., 177, 194. 

"Individual Differences," (Thorndike), 150 f. 

" Infant Criticism," (Aydelotte), vs. genuine opinions on books, 264 ff. 

Information or fact details, irrelevant to purposes of literature, 212 ff., 
229 ff. ; dangers of, when recent and undigested, 67, 69; really 
significant and valuable, 214 ff., 219 f., 224 ff., 227 f., 231 ff., 
239 ; test for relevant vs. irrelevant, 212. 

" Inner Dramatizing " in reading literature, 88, 289. 

Insight, Creative, the ultimate value of the literature of power, 
42 ff., 46 ff., 261. 

Instincts, or original satisfactions, 88 ff. ; all based, perhaps, on " love 
of sensory life for its own sake ", 89 f . 

Intelligent Reading, Essential Characteristics of, 165-9; con- 
trast with poor reading illustrated (Thorndike), 166 f . ; analyzed, 
(Lyman), 168; not a receptive, but an active, personal, construc- 
tive process, 167 f. 

Interests, Beginning with Children's Actual, 75 ff., 86 ff. ; 
literature must appeal to immediate experience and, 101 ff. 

Interpretation of Life, sine qua non of genuine literature, 17, 27 ff., 
42 ff., 49 f . ; effective only when built upon concrete experience, 
27 ; need to analyze and question, 28, 188 ff. ; inevitable, 30. 

Interpretation of Literature, class help in, 200 ff., 224 ff., 227 f., 
232 f., 244 ff. ; vs. more purely objective presentation, 224 f . ; 
vs. conventional " moral-pointing ", 226 f . 



INDEX 449 

Introductions to Literature, 209 ff., 241 ff. ; must be themselves real- 
izable experience, 242 f.; to Shakespeare, Bible stories, Greek 
myths, etc., 251 ff. ; bad and obstructive, 242, 246 ff., 250 f ., 260 f . ; 
needlessly critical, 250 f ., 258 f . ; sentimentalist, 242 f . ; beginning 
without, 246 f ., 250 f ., 254 ; reading aloud with comments, or with- 
out, for poetry especially, 209 ff., 247 ff. ; attitude or " mind-set " 
often fundamental, 254, 255 ff. 

James, William, "Habit" cited, 118. 

Jennings, Blanford, on " promotive " book-notes, 236. 

Job and the idea of justice, 2>7 f- 

Jordan, A. M., Children's Interests in Reading, cited, and tables 
quoted, 80 ff., 93, 109 f., 112. 

Judd, C. H., Reading, Its Nature and Development, cited, 148. 

Julius Caesar, a class discussion of the central idea of, 227 ff. ; a good 
introduction to, 251 ff. ; examination on, 276 f . ; dramatic read- 
ing of, 301 f. 

Justice, theories of abstract, 37; and other forms of moralizing, 27 ff- 

Kansas Si lent- Reading Tests (W. S. Monroe), revised form, 144. 
Kerfoot, J. B., How to Read, cited, 18, 20, 88, 160 f., 163, 220 f. 
Kilpatrick, W. H., " The Project Method," cited, 77. 
Knowing how to read, necessity of, in school, 140; for teachers, 

59 f - 
Knowing Real Children, yy ff. 

Laboratory Equipment for Teaching Literature, chiefly books, 131, 

136 f., 205 ff., 254 f. 
Lady of the Lake, good and bad reading of, 163, 209 ff., 211. 
Lamb, Charles, Essays of Elia, cited, 45, 69, 91 ; reserve and restraint 

in writings (Pater), 44. 
Lamborn, E. A. Greening — The Rudiments of Criticism, cited 

(note), 72. 
Lawlessness, American, and our literature of ideals, 117 ff. 
Leacock, Stephen, Nonsense Novels, 23. 
Lesson in Appreciation, The (Hayward), 69, 214 f., 243 f. 
Library bindings vs. cheap-looking texts (Bamberger study), 137, 206. 
Library Organisation and Equipment, Report of Committee on (Cer- 
tain), cited, 134, 185. 
Library reference, teaching children methods of, 183, 185, 197; for 

junior high schools, 197 f. 
Libraries, Public, lists and exhibits of books, 104 f . ; cooperation with 

schools, 206 f. 
Libraries, School, standards in book-selection for, 103 f., 131 ff., 134, 

205 ff. ; E. R. Glenn's study of, 131 ff. ; useless and harmful books 

in, 132 f. 

29 



450 INDEX 

Lighting and Extinction of Feathertop, The, a ninth-grade dramatiza- 
tion, 313 ff. 

Lincoln, Abraham, the simplicity of his style, 73 ; Gettysburg Address, 
28; a seventh-grade stage-setting for, 307 ff. 

Linking books with previous experiences, 232, 243 ff., and with pre- 
vious reading, 249. 

Lippmann, Walter, Liberty and the News, (note), 188. 

Lists of Books for Children's Reading, discussed, 103, 130 f . ; in Ap- 
pendix II, 370 ff. ; public-library and Scout lists, 104 f. 

Literary Equipment, The Teacher's, 51 ff. ; actual conditions, 51 ff. ; 
possible remedies, 57 ff. ; inventory of essentials, 59 ff. 

Literary Influences, of period and people on a work of art, 68 ff., 
251 ff. 

Literary Study in the Grades and High Schools : its purpose, 
real experience of a phase of life portrayed, and grasp of its 
fundamental and unifying idea, 17 f., 42 ff., 50, 53 ff. ; need of a 
place in school for experience as experience, 138 f., 200 ff. ; 
purpose not achieved by formal and detailed study, 217 ff. ; con- 
structive vs. analytical approach, 202, 209 ff., 217 ff., 220 f., 246 f., 
258 f., 278 f., 239; to be apprehended rather in the "play" or 
art spirit, 202 f . ; promoted by re-reading, 137 ; class help in the 
study of, 200 ff., 203 ff., 224 ff., 232, 243 ff. ; as requiring real 
study, 202 f., 255 f. ; uses of composition in apprehending, 262 ff. 

Literature, defined, 17 ff. ; aiding an " inner dramatizing of experi- 
ence," 88, 289; vs. unrealizable statements, 21 ff., 128 f.; a "mighty 
bloodless substitute for life," 244; need for experience as experi- 
ence, 130 f . ; realization the best test, 256 ; effect of, light on one's 
own experience, 17 f., 42 ff., 50, 53 ff., 60, 255 f . ; dependent on 
what happens inside the individual reader, 18 ff., 29; can use only 
store of previous experiences, 18, 89, 231 ff., 241 ff. ; vs. sentimen- 
talist writings, 24 ff. ; vs. optimistic moralizings, 33 ff. ; criteria 
of, 18 ff. ; it must be realizable, true to experience, 30 ff., and 
significant, 42 ff. ; necessity of such criteria, for teachers espe- 
cially, 70; the question of excellence of manner, or style, 71 ff.; 
appreciation of, a by-product of genuine experience, 255 ff. ; 
major classifications of — " of knowledge " and " of power " (litera- 
ture proper) (DeQuincey), 42, 66, 126 f . ; major classifications, 
based on the writer's purpose, 65 ff., 130, 222 ff. 

Literature, children's own genuine writing as, 262, 277 ff., 2^7. 

Literature, examinations in, 274 ff. 

Literature for Children, Selection of, 75 ff., 80 ff., 101 ff., 103 f. 
256; must be close linked to individual experiences and interests, 
and genuinely fine by as stringent criteria as for adult literature, 
101 ff. ; for the book clubs, 204 ff. ; as actually chosen, frequently 
beyond children's grasp or interest, 102; for the primary grades, 
106 ff. 



INDEX 451 

Lord Jim (Conrad), cited, 119. 

Love Interest, dangers of unripe, 112 ff. ; development into ideals 
of wholesome comradeship, 114 f., 116. 

Lowell, Commemoration Ode, quoted, in. 

Luck, poetic justice, etc., 34 ff. 

Lyman, R. L., " The Teaching of Assimilative Reading," 168, 183, 198 ; 
and Others, " Differentiating Instruction in Ninth-Grade Eng- 
lish," 172. 

Macbeth, quoted, 72. 

Magazines and newspapers, teaching selective and discriminating read- 
ing of, 186 ff. 
Maloney, Josephine E., third-grade dramatization, 295 ff. 
Manner, excellence of, see Style. 
Masefield, Sea Fever, quoted, 18. 

Mathiews, Franklin K., lists of books for Boy Scouts, 105 f. 
Matthews, Brander, Study of the Drama, 41, 229; Study of Versifi- 
cation, 67; Shakesperian studies cited, 68; These Many Years 

(note), 201. 
Maupassant, "La Mere Sauvage," in The Odd Number, cited, 26 f. 
Measurement of the Ability to Read (H. A. Brown), 144; standards 

from (1916), 152; graphs from, 149 ff. 
Measuring the actual results of reading instruction, 138 ff. 
Melville, Herman, Typee, 84. 
Memorizing, 156, 164; vs. comprehending, 144, 164; promoted vs. 

required, in literature classes, 234 ff. 
Memory Contest in the Madison High School (Mary Hargrave), 234. 
Memory of what is read no index of comprehension, 144; trained in 

preference to understanding in formal teaching, 156, 164; of 

literature, 234 ff. 
Meredith, George, Essay on Comedy, 46 ; The Egoist, 46 f . ; Richard 

Fever el, 39, 47, 225. 
Merrill, John, " Drama and the School," cited (note) , 304. 
Methods in teaching reading, failure of conventional, 156 ff. ; based 

on right principles and diagnostic tests, 165, 177 ff. 
Midsummer Night's Dream, an introduction to (Charlotte Porter 

cited), 252. 
" Mind-set " or attitude, importance of, 172 ff., 221 ff., 241 ff., 254, 

255 ff. ; danger in emotional arousal, 242 ff. 
Missionary Zeal, 38; in introducing and recommending books, 242 f., 

262 f. 
Monroe, W. S., Revised Silent Reading Tests, 144; on importance of 

speed in silent reading, 169. 
Moore, T. Sturge, Some Soldier Poets, cited, 259. 
Moral-pointing vs. discovering fundamental interpretation, 226 f. 



452 INDEX 

Morality, ideas of, in ancient story, 33, 107; vs. truth to experience, 

36, 41, 226; theories of, distorting, 36 ff., 41, 95 f., 117 f., 

224 f ., 226. 
Morbid experiences and adult sorrows in literature given to children 

(W. H. Hudson cited), 102. 
Morris, William, Greek Myths in the Earthly Paradise, 22. 
Mothering and pitying often irrational in manifestations, 95 f.; 

social potentialities of redirecting, 114 ff. 
Music, essential contribution of, to realizing literature, 245 f ., 254 f . ; 

harm of poor, 255. 
Myths, children's enjoyment of, 96 ff., 106 f . ; not to be spoiled by 

moralized, sentimentalized, and written-down versions, 107 f. ; an 

introduction to the Greek, 253. 

Newspapers and periodicals, reading of (F. N. Scott, cited), 187 ff. ; 

Lippmann, cited, 188. 
Nonsense, 33 f ., 46, 107 ; and the sense of humor, 45 f . ; children's 

enjoyment of, for a time outgrown, 97; necessity of distinguishing 

from reality, 33 f., 108 ff. 
Notes cumbered with allusions, 213 ff. ; with " deciduous information," 

212 ff . ; reasons for this distemper, 215 ff . ; pupils' own notes on 

books read, 266 ff. 
Novels with a purpose, 36 ff. 

O'Brien, J. A., Silent Reading, on securing speed, 169 f. 
Old Testament Narratives as literature, 52, 108 ; introduction to, 253. 
On the Art of Reading (Quiller-Couch), cited, 200 ff., 202, 233. 
Opinions distinguished from facts, 188 ff. ; paralleling " images and 

ideas," distinction, 224 ff. 
Oral Reading, Teaching of, danger of, in slowing pace of silent 

reading, 191 ; its proper place, in literature periods, 191 f . ; 

necessity of purpose, 192; use of Dr. W. S. Gray's tests, 191 f. ; 

proper criticism of, 193. 
Order of establishment of habits in reading, 195 f., 197. 
Organized Study of Literature, 236 ff. 
Organization of larger units, generally neglected in teaching reading, 

178 ff., 197; generally neglected, 178 f., 180; importance of 

getting one central point, 181. 
Original Nature of Man (E. L. Thorndike), 78, 90, 91, 92, 94, 95, 

115, 119; basis of children's reading interests in, 88 ff. 

Palmer, Frederick, Folly of the Nations, 187. 

Palmer, G. H., on "aptitude for vicariousness," 61. 

Pantomime, values of, for early dramatizings (Miss Perego), 291 ff. 

Parker, S. C., " Habits of Harmless Enjoyment," 98. 

Pater, Appreciations, quoted, 44 f . ; story of Cupid and Psyche, 22. 



INDEX 453 

Pendleton, C. S., on class procedure, 207 f . ; on teaching Bible 
stories, 253. 

Perception (percepts) at the basis of emotions, ideas, and apprecia- 
tion, 18, 30, 232, 243 ff., 50. 

Periodicals and newspapers, the reading of, 186 ff. 

Phillpotts, Eden, From the Angle of Seventeen, 99, 113. 

Philosophy of life meaningless to children, 102; significant product of 
genuine experience, 49 ff. 

Pitying, satisfaction of, 95 f . ; harmful results of, 95 f., 115; social 
potentiality of, 114 ff. 

Play Way, The, (H. Caldwell Cook), cited, 202, 305. 

Poems Written During the Great War and Poems of the War and the 
Peace, cited (note), no. 

Poetry, knowing essential criteria of, 66 ; reading aloud, 249 ff. ; the 
Abbott-Trabue tests, 54 ff., 143, 218 f ., 249. 

" Pointing a moral " vs. fundamental interpretation of idea, 226 f . 

Porter, Charlotte, on Shakespearian plays, 252. 

Porter, Minnie E., " Reading and Literature," a classroom study, 83. 

Preface, table of contents, index, etc., use of, in reading, 180 ff. 

Prejudice, inculcation of, in literature teaching, 258 f. 

Principles, Fundamental Educational, 75 ff. 

Principles of Efficient Method in the Teaching of Reading, 
165 ff. 

"Project Method," (Dr. Kilpatrick), yy. 

Providing Essential Backgrounds, 241 ff., vs. false, futile ap- 
proaches, 242, 246 f. 

Psychology of Childhood (Norworthy and Whitley), cited, yy. 

Puppet- Shows or marionettes, in early dramatizing, 291 ff. 

Purpose, in Mastery of Technique of Reading, necessity of real 
and various, 76 ff., 173, 176 ff . ; two ways of securing: having 
subject-matter and activities of real and perceivable worth, 76 f., 
177; showing objectively pupils' status and gains, 150 ff., 177, 
196 ff. ; social, best of all, 177 ; three types of, in teaching reading, 
172 ff., 194 ff. ; pupil's own selection of, 189 ff., 194 f . 

Purpose, in Approaching Literature, best, unconscious zest for ex- 
perience, 138, 200, 241 ff. 

Purpose of the Writer, an essential determinant of types of litera- 
ture, 65 ff., 222 ff., 271 f.; illustrations of (Hinchman), 223. 

Quiller-Couch, On the Art of Reading, on " treating the classic abso- 
lutely," 200 f., 202; on "reserved delights," 233. 
Quintilian, on " circulatory volubility," 158. 

Rate of Silent Reading, 140 ff. ; related to comprehension, 148 ff., 171 ; 
where and how to secure, 169 ff., 197; standards in (Brown and 
Courtis), 152; dividing a class on basis of, 171. 



454 INDEX 

Reading Ability (Silent Reading or Study), necessity of, for 
pupils, 138 ff., 170; for teachers, 60; requires a store of experi- 
ences, but also mastery of a technique, 60, 138 f . ; finding pupils 
actual level of, 140 ff., by tests vs. unchecked observation and 
opinion, 140 ; startling findings of tests, 140 ff., 161 ; relatior 
of various purposes to, 172 ff. 

Reading aloud, with or without comment, an excellent introduction. 
191 ff., 209 ff., 247 ff. ; teacher's reading must be pleasant and 
unaffected and good, 248. See also Oral Reading. 

Reading, An Examination into the Teacing of, 138 ff. ; results of 
conventional methods in, 140 ff., 156 ff. 

Reading and Literature, defined and distinguished, 138 ff., 200 ff. ; 
proportioning, in school, 139. 

"Reading as Reasoning " (E. L. Thorndike), 141 ff., 143, 161, 165 ff., 
178 f. 

Reading, "but not curiously" — skimming — 174 f. 

Reading Clubs or Book Clubs (Hinchman), 203 ff. 

Reading, Essential Characteristics of Intelligent (Lyman), 
168 ; requires organization and selective thinking, 166 f . ; not pas- 
sive or receptive, 168; illustrated (Thorndike), 166. 

Reading in detail — " chewing and digesting " — 175' ff. ; the method of, 
questioning and supplementing, illustrated, 165, 166 ff . ; necessity 
especially of genuine purpose here, 176 ff. 

Reading in Ever Wider Units (Hosic), necessity and method of, 
178 ff. ; pupils' failure to grasp whole paragraph units — still less 
chapters and sections, 178 f . ; to be developed f rOm intermediate 
grades onward, 197. 

Reading-Matter, responses to actual, 140 ff. ; needs testing and re- 
vision, 138 f., 140; use of periodicals, 186 ff. 

Reading, necessity of, in all school subjects, 138 f., 140, 170. 

Reading Scales and Tests, nature of the best, 140 ; advantages of, 
over opinion, 140 f . ; dangers of abuse, 149; illustrations of tests 
and actual replies, 141 ff. ; Revised Kansas scales (W. S. Monroe), 
144; Courtis, 144, illustrated, 145 f . ; Thorndike and Thorndike- 
McCall, 140, illustrated, 146 ff., W. S. Gray, 143, 153, 191 ; Burgess, 
145; standards in, 151 f. ; interpreting and using results of, 
149 ff., 171. 

Reading, Principles of Efficient Method in Teaching, 165 ff., 
193 ff. ; results of conventional methods in teaching, 140 ff., 
156 ff. ; characteristics of skilful (Lyman, Thorndike), 165-8. 

Reading Tests, see Reading Scales, and Tests. 

Realizable Presentation of Life in Literature, 18 ff. ; vs. unreal- 
izable statements, 21 f., 128 f. 

Realization, essential to understanding a book, 224 ff . ; best test of 
apprehending, 231 ff., 261 ; requires bringing previous experience to 
bear, 256, 275 ; class help in, 200, 203 ff., 244 f . 



INDEX 455 

Recitation, Time wasted in memory questions, 178; vs. brief written 
test of mastery, 178; as true discussion and supplement to realiza- 
tion, 177 f., 244 ff. 

Reference books, learning to use, 174, 183 ff., 197. 

Reference library, learning the use of, 183 ff., 197. 

Relative versus absolute improvement in skill, 150 f. 

" Reliability and Significance of Tests of General Intelligence," 
(Thorndike), 149. 

Reports on reading in Book Clubs, 204 ff., 207, 236, 262 ff. ; as pro- 
motive literature, 236, 244; value of, 207; scheme for (Hinchman), 
223 f ., 266 f . ; examples of, from grades and high school, 266 ff. 

Reproduction, not a valid test of ability to understand, 143; of little 
value in book reports, 263 f. 

Rereading excellent books, how to stimulate, 233. 

Restraint, vs. the bestial, trivial, and pernicious, 39, 43 ff. ; Pater 
quoted, 44 f. 

Return of Odysseus, ninth-grade dramatization, setting for, 306. 

Reynolds, G. F., "For Minimum Standards in Literature" (note), 129. 

Reynolds and Greever, The Facts and Backgrounds of Literature, 69. 

.Rostand, Edmond, The Romancers, taken seriously by some adoles- 
cents, 113. 

Rudiments of Criticism, The, E. A. Greening-Lamborn, cited (note), 72. 

Satisfaction, the relation of to purpose, definitely perceivable gain, 
and successful work, 150 ff., 196. 

School libraries, standards in selecting books for, 103 f., 131 ff., 134; 
E. R. Glenn's study, 131 ff. ; lists of books for, 103, 130 ff., 
Appendix II, 369 ff. ; useful and hurtful books in, 134. 

School and Sport, stories of, bad spirit of many, 84 ff., in ff. 

Scott, F. N., " The Undefended Gate," 186 ff. 

Scott, The Lady of the Lake, good and bad reading of, 163, 209 ff. ; 
as literary artist and as antiquary, 212 ff. ; Ivanhoe, reading of, 
31, 162 f. 

Scouts, lists of books for, 105 f. 

Selection, of Literature for Children, close to their actual experi- 
ence and interest, 75 f., 86 ff., 101 ff., and thoroughly excellent, 
101 ff. ; of silent-reading textbooks (Horn), 138 f. 

Selections, books of, place in teaching reading and literature, 138 
f., 206. 

.Self -consciousness, freeing from through dramatization (Mrs. 
Fry), 333. 

> elf -Reliance (Emerson), quoted, 96; Woodberry on, 258. 
.ensory experience, first essential of realizing literature, 18, 21, 89, 
203, 231 ff., 243 ff. ; inseparable from feeling and interpreting, 

24, 50. 
'entimentalism, defined, 37; and the Happy Ending, 32 ff. ; based 
often in instinctive pity, 95, and false ideals, 118. 



456 INDEX 

Separating reading (study) and literature, reasons for, 138 f., 200. 
Setting a higher standard and increasing appreciation through pupils' 

composition, 278 ff. 
Setting and properties for dramatizations, etc., 305 ff. 
Shakespeare, Julius Cesar, 227 ff., 251 ft*., 301 f. ; Midsummer Night's 

Dream, 252. 
Sharp, Dallas Lore, " Education for Individuality " and " Education 

for Authority," 201. 
Shaw, G. B., "Maxims for Revolutionists," quoted, 47. 
Side-paths, desirable, 219 ff., 231 ff. ; irrelevant and dangerous, 212 ff., 

229 ff., 230 ff. 
Significant, in literature, vs. trivial and immaterial, 46 ff. ; based in 

creative insight, rouses appreciation of one's own experience, 

46 ff., 49 ff. 
Significance to Children Now, an essential criterion in education, 

75 f . ; helping children to realize genuine significance, 76 f . ; on 

selecting children's books in view of this, 86 ff., 101 ff. 
Silas Marner in literature classes, 113, 225, 244, 248, 302. 
Silent Reading, more significant than oral reading, 140 ff., 191 f.; 

results of neglecting, 140 ff. ; methods of attacking the problem, 

169 ff. ; developing speed in, 148 ff., 169; texts for, 138 f. 
Single, Impression necessary in reading a piece of literature, 229. 
" Skimming in Reading, Preliminary Investigation of " (Whipple and 

Curtis), 174 f. 
Skinner, Margaret, ' " Socializing Dramatics," cited, 120, 290, 334. 
Smith, C. Alphonso, What Can Literature Do for Met cited, 67, 73. 
Social Living with Children, important for teachers, 78 ff. 
Social values of dramatization, 120, 334. 
" Social Recitation," cited, 334- 
Sorrow and morbidity in children's literature, harm of (Hudson), 

102 f. 
Spectator papers, an introduction to, 201, 253 f. 
Speed in Silent Reading, see Rate. 

Springmeyer, C. E., on oral reading and the necessity of purpose, 193. 
Stage settings for plays, etc., 307 ff. 
Standards of literary appreciation, setting higher, 278 f. 
Standards in speed and comprehension in silent reading (Brown, 

Courtis, and Thorndike), 151 f. 
Statements, weighing and testing, 188 ff. ; especially in reading news- 
papers (Scott), 186; sorting fact from opinion, 188 ff. 
" Stepping-stones books " in general omitted from the reading lists, 104. 
Stevenson, R. L., Kidnapped, 84; "Penny Plain and Twopence 

Colored" 88; "A Humble Remonstrance," 32; "A Gossip on 

Romance," 117; "Old Mortality," 116; Cruse, life of, cited, 88. 
" Storage theory of education," harm of, 75 f ., 128 f., 214 f., 233 ff. 



INDEX 457 

Structure of a piece of literature, essential consideration of, 227 ff.; 

should lead to a single impression, 229; examinations to test 

recognition of this, 274 ff. 
" Studies of Elementary School Reading through Standardized Tests " 

(W. S. Gray), 143 f., 152, 191 f. 
Study, reading for reference, 174 f.; reading in detail, 175 ff . ; of 

literature, good vs. bad, 209 ff. 
Style, excellence of, dependent on quality of subject-matter, 70 ff. ; 

characterized by objectivity and homely fineness, 73 ff. ; good and 

harmful attention to, 230 f. 
" Subject-Matter" books, 126 ff. ; criteria for, 128 f . ; wealth of avail- 
able material, 129, 130 ff. 
Subject matter, excellence of, stimulates good reading, 177. 
Submission and hero-worship, satisfaction of, 94, 119 ff. 
Summarizing what is read, useful in teaching reading or study, 178 ff. ; 

probably harmful in literature classes and in book-reports, 263 ff. 
Summaries of Chapters: I, 50; II, 73 f . ; III, 99 f . ; IV, Criteria of 

literature for children, 125, 136 f.; V, Diagnostic tests, 155, 164; 

VI, 193 ff., 198 f . ; VII, 239 f . ; VIII, 259-61 ; IX, 287 f . ; X, 331-5 

Summarizing Chapter (XI), 335-7. 
Supervised study and silent reading, 186. 
Supplementing what one reads, from mental stock (Lyman), 168; 

essential in apprehending literature, 18 ff., 61 ff. ; an exercise for 

truly social class work, 244 f. 
Swallowing, books for, 174 ff. (i.e., "reading, but not curiously"). 
Sympathy, based in pity, but a different thing, 95 f., 114 ff. 

Tall, Lida Lee, on teaching children to use books intelligently, 182. 

" Tasting "—skipping, referring, and selecting, 174 ff. 

Teacher's Literary Equipment, The, 51 ff. ; actual conditions, 
51-7 ; essential equipment, 57 ff. ; should know at least fundamental 
great literature for high-school classes and period courses, 64 ff. ; 
margin of time for study while teaching to be fought for, 58. 

Teacher of Literature, his duty: to supplant poor reading by bet- 
ter, 83 ff. ; to help in realization or " sensing " of literature ; and 
in its interpretation, 200 ff., 244 ff . ; to restrain his prejudices and 
dislikes, 258 ff. ; to restrain over-exuberant appreciation, 242, 246 ; 
to resist the temptation to formalize and iron smooth, 289 f . 

"Teaching of Assimilative Reading" (Lyman), 168, 183, 197. 

Teaching of Intelligent Reading, what it entails, 165 ff. 

Teaching of English, The (Carpenter, Baker, and Scott), cited, 179, 
229, 214. 

Teaching of English in the Secondary School (C. S. Thomas), 124, 
232. 



458 INDEX 

Teaching of Literature, causes of failure in, 103, 209 ff., 217 ff.; 
finding "central conception", and realizing the experience pre- 
sented, 225 ff. ; Relating what is read to pupils' former experi- 
ences, 231 ff., 241 ff., 244 f. ; uses of composition in, 262 ff. See 
also Analysis in Detail, Appreciation of Literature, Appreciation 
of Experience, Class Help in the Study of Literature, Literary 
Study, and Literature. 

Teaching of Poetry, The (Fairchild), cited, 27, 137, 229 f. 

Teaching of Reading, separated from that of literature, 200 ff., 138 ff. ; 
failure of conventional methods, as measured by tests, 140 ff., 
156 ff. ; principles of efficient method in, 165 ff. 

Technique or Structure, attention to literary, 230 ff. ; for purposes of 
attempting creative work, 262 ff. 

Telling vs. showing— realization, ?6. 

Testing the results, of teaching reading, 139 ff. ; of teaching literature, 
with books open, 262 f . ; 274 ff. 

Texts for studying reading, needed, 138 f . ; distinguished from litera- 
ture books, 206 ; badly annotated literary works, 241 ff., 246 ff. 

Thackeray, Henry Esmond, 19, 253 ff . ; Pendennis, 89; The Rose and 
the Ring, 107. 

Theaters, Elizabethan, an introduction to, 251 ff. 

Thomas, C. S., Teaching of English in the Secondary School, 125, 232. 

Thoreau, Walden, quoted, 92. 

Thorndike, E. L., Educational Psychology, 78, 90, 91, 92, 94, 95, 115, 
119, 151, 193 ff. ; illustration of poor vs. intelligent reading, 166 f . ; 
" Psychology of the Half-Educated Man," 35 ; " Reading as 
Reasoning," quoted, 141, 143, 161, 165 ff., 178 f.; "Reliability and 
Significance of Tests of General Intelligence," 149, discussing 
dangers of tests misinterpreted; Thorndike Alpha 2 and Thorn- 
dike-McCall Reading Scales, 140 ff., 145 ff. ; standards in 
comprehension, 151 f. 

Tragedy, Aristotle's theory of, 39 f. 

Traveling Libraries, help possible from, 207. 

Trivial and immaterial experience, see Significance, and Insight. 

Truth in Literature, to Human Experience, immense difficulty of 
judging — partial truth only possible, 30 ff . ; in showing effects of 
human motives and actions, 31 ; about war, and the reality of 
courage, 38 ff., 109 ff. ; in interpreting cause and effect, 30 f . ; vs. 
the happy ending, luck, and optimistic ideas about justice, 33 ff.; 
children's growing demands for, 108 ff., 265 f. ; not concerned 
with truth to facts or manners, 30 f . 

Truth to facts, in "subject-matter books," 128 f. 

"Turning the class back on itself" (Pendleton), 207 f. 



INDEX 459 

Types of Excellent Literature within Children's Interests, 
ioi ff.; as high a standard necessary for children's literature 
as for adults', ioi ; closeness to children's interests and experiences 
also essential, 86 ff., 102 ff. 

"Undefended Gate, The" (F. N. Scott), 186 f. 

Understanding Literature, Class Help in, 200 ff., 227 f., 232 f., 

244 f . ; in Book Clubs, 203 ff. 
Understood Betsy (Canfield), quoted, 209 ff. 
Unrealized statements, valueless as experience, 21, 128. 
Uses of Composition in Teaching Literature, 262 ff. 

Values of Educational Dramatics, 290, 301, 331 ff. 
Variety and depth of first-hand experience, necessity of, 18 ff. ; for 
teachers particularly, 61 ff. 

War, the truth about — false and real versions cited, 109 ff., 187. 

Weighing and testing statements and sorting fact from opinion, 
especially in reading newspapers, 186 ff. 

Were You Ever a Child? (Dell), cited, 103, 243 f. 

Wharton, Edith, Ethan Frome, 54, 113; Summer, 114; The Touch- 
stone, 54; "The Mission of Jane" in Descent of Man, 21. 

What an author is trying to do, basis of major classifications of litera- 
ture, 65 ff., 222 ff. ; reading in each type, value of, 67. 

What pupils like, better reported than why they like it (F. T. 
Baker), 265; with specific illustrations, 266 ff. 

What is going on in pupils' minds, necessary for the teacher to find 
out, 138 ff. ; help of the reading tests, 140 ff. ; difficulty of imagin- 
ing, 167; relation to introductions, 259 ff. 

What Reading to Teach Where, 197 ff. 

" What sort of book is it ? " a valuable question in children's reports, 
266 ff. 

What Study is of Most Worth, in literature classes, 220 ff. 

Whipple and Curtis, " Preliminary Investigation of Skimming in 
Reading," 175. 

Why less easy to answer than what, in pupils' book reports (F. T. 
Baker), 265 ff. 

Wilson, Randolph C, " A Schoolboy's Nightmare," cited, 302. 

Wonder at the unfamiliar, a child's pleasure in, in folk and fairy 
tales, 89 ff., 106 ff. 

Woodberry, G. E., Appreciation of Literature, The, cited, 31, 63; 
quoted, 258. 

Word-Study, use and abuse of, in teaching reading, 156, 158 ff . ; how 
new words are really mastered — understood in context only, 
160 ff. ; meanings provisional, to be tested and revised in con- 
text by intelligent guessing, 162 f . ; " More words about words " — 
telling vs. demonstration, 76, 242, 246 f. 



4 6o INDEX 

Wordsworth, William, on language or diction, 71 f. 

Worth-while subject-matter and skills, of social and immediate sig- 
nificance, requiring only, 75 f . ; helping pupils realize its worth, 
76 f. 

Wright, Harold Bell, quoted, 22; Re-Creation of Brian Kent, cited, 
25; as a continuer of the tradition of great fiction, 52. 

Zirbes, Laura, "Diagnostic Measurements as a Basis of Procedure," 
171. 






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